Chameleon

I

The frigid February wind swept in off Boston Bay, and Eliza Gunn and George Gentry huddled in the arched doorway to avoid the stinging snow that was swept along with it. The car was half a block away. James, the sound man, a latter-day hippie who was only slightly larger than Eliza, would be sitting in there with his cowboy hat pulled down over his eyes and the heater on, listening to the Top Forty while they froze their onions here on Foster Street.

It had been four days since they started following Ellen Delaney, making like the FBI, changing cars twice a day, keeping in touch on CB Channel 11. So far, it had been a waste of time. But by now George knew better than to bitch. The minute he did, the Delaney dame would o something dumb. And they would score. It always turned out that way. Eliza had strange instincts, but they worked. So he kept his mouth shut and turned the collar of his jacket up a little higher and pulled his head down into it. ‘I’m catching pneumonia,’ he said. ‘Somebody ought to put a sticker on your butt, It should say:

“Caution, the Surgeon General has determined that Eliza Gunn is dangerous to your health.”

‘A big guy like you, complaining,’ she said. ‘You should be ashamed.’

‘There’s three times as much of me to get cold,’ he growled.

George Gentry was over six feet tall, and his weight ranged between two-twenty and two-fifty, depending on how well he was eating. Eliza Gunn was barely five feet and weighed ninety-eight pounds, no matter what the ate. Mutt and Jeff, freezing their onions in a doorway because Eliza had a hunch.

‘How come James always gets the car and I always get the Street?’

‘He drives better than you do.’

‘I’ll be goddamned!’

‘Now, Georgie—’

‘Don’t gimme any of that sweet-talkin’ shit.’

‘Trust me, Georgie-boy. My instincts are going crazy. All my Systems are on go.’

‘The last time this happened,’ George said ruefully, ‘I had four Mafia torpedoes baby-sitting me while I shot your exclusive interview with Tomatoes What’sisname.’

‘Garganzola.’

‘Hell, his name isn’t Garganzola. Tomatoes Garganzola sounds like something off a Mexican menu. I thought at any minute you were gonna ask the wrong question and we were all gonna end up in the foundation of some bridge somewhere.’

‘But I didn’t. Besides, Tomatoes was cute.’

‘Right. The DA’s after him, the Feds are after him, everybody but the goddamn Marine Corps was on his ass, for every felony on the books — and you, fer Chrissakes, think he’s cute.’

‘It won us an Emmy, Georgie.’

‘I work for wages, not glory.’

‘Oh, bullshit.’

And George started to laugh. He always laughed at her profanity. It was like hearing a child cuss.

She ignored the cold, watching the office building through binoculars.

‘If we had—’ he began.

‘George!’

‘Hunh?’

‘There she is,’ Eliza said.

‘Lemme see.’

She handed him the binoculars. ‘Coming out of the bank building, in the mink jacket.’

‘How about the blond hair?’

She took the glasses and zeroed in on the Delaney woman

— tall, over five-ten, and stacked. Eliza checked her out again, especially the legs, the walk: It was Ellen Delaney, all right. She was positive. ‘It’s a wig. Look at the coat. I’d know that mink anywhere. She was wearing it the day Caldwell disappeared. Must have cost ten thou at least.’

‘You know how many mink jackets there are in the city of Boston?’

‘Not like that one. That’s a sweetie-pi e mink, George.’

The woman, holding her jacket closed with gloved hands, started up Foster toward Congress.

‘That’s just the kind of coat the head of the biggest bank in Boston would give his honey,’ she said, still watching.

‘Now what?’ George asked.

‘She’s hoofing it toward Congress,’ Eliza said. ‘Gimme the walkie-talkie. I’ll follow her; you go back to the car with James and stand by, just in case she decides to make her move.’

‘Which you’re convinced she will.’

‘Sooner or later. She’s a lady in love, George, and I know how a woman in love thinks. She’s going to want to see her man.’

She grabbed the walkie-talkie and took off on the run, her short legs propelling her along the snow- swept Street, her short black hair dancing dervishly in the wind. George walked around the corner to Eliza’s car, a dark green Olds whose front end looked as though it might have been used, on more than one occasion, as a battering ram. He climbed in and flicked off the radio.

‘You’re not gonna believe it,’ George said to the sound man, ‘but she actually spotted the Delaney woman.’

‘Oh, I believe it,’ James said and laughed. ‘I been wrong too often not to believe it.’

‘You know how she spotted her?’

‘Tell me.’

‘The mink coat.’

James laughed again. ‘Neat,’ he said, ‘if she’s right.’

Five more minutes in that goddamn doorway, I woulda been in intensive care.’

Eliza followed the tall woman in the mink coat along Foster to Salem to Congress. The woman entered a drugstore and went straight to the prescription counter in -the rear.

Eliza crossed the street, looking at the posters in front of a theatre, her back to the store. ‘This is E.G., you reading me?’ she said into the walkie-talkie.

‘Gotcha,’ George answered.

‘Salem and Congress, across from the Rexall drugstore. Get in close.’

‘On the way.’

Ellen Delaney got a package, signed the slip and came out. She started up Congress again, then suddenly veered across the street to Eliza’s side, flagged a cab, jumped in and headed back down Congress in the opposite direction.

‘Oh, shit!’ Eliza said to herself.

The green Olds appeared seconds later and she jumped in. ‘U-turn! She’s in the Yellow Cab heading back that way,’ she yelled.

James swung the Olds in a tight turn, cut in front of a truck, almost went up on the curb, and screeched off after the taxi. ‘Is she on to us?’ he asked.

‘Nah,’ said Eliza, ‘she’s just seen too many James Bond movies,’

‘They’re headin’ for the tunnel,’ James said.

‘Shit, Caldwell wouldn’t be caught dead in North Boston,’ George answered.

‘That’s probably what he hopes everybody thinks,’ Eliza said. They followed the cab through the tunnel and out into the north side. It moved slowly, weaving through the trucks and vans that choked the narrow streets of the market section.

‘That slowed her down,’ James said.

The cab turned into a quiet street of restored town houses and stopped. The woman got out, looked around and went inside one of the houses.

‘He’s in there. Betcha a week’s salary.’

‘Instinct again, Gunn?’ George said sceptically.

‘Guessing,’ she said. ‘We’ve been on her for — what, four days now? Caldwell’s a diabetic. I’m betting she just picked up his insulin for the week.’

‘Wanna cruise down past the place?’ James asked.

‘Let’s just cool it and see what happens. I don’t see her Mercedes anywhere.’

‘Lemme see the glasses a minute,’ George said, and began to appraise the street. He focused on the house she had entered.

‘It’s got a garage built in,’ he said.

‘So much for the missing Mercedes.’

‘Where’s the equipment’?’ Eliza asked.

‘Back seat on the floor, in case we need it fast.’

‘Good.’

‘If he’s in there, he’s not coming Out,’ George said. ‘We’re dealing with a sports freak, George, he jogs five miles a day,’ Eliza said. ‘How long can he stay holed up without coming up for air?’

‘If he’s in there,’ George said.

‘Yeah,’ said James, ‘and if he is, what’s to say he hasn’t been jogging every morning? Nobody’s looking for him over here.’

‘Well,’ George said, ‘at least it’s someplace new. We sure know all her other haunts.’

‘I got that feeling,’ Eliza said.

Fifteen minutes passed. Twenty. Thirty. Nothing. George casually checked out the street again through the binoculars.

James said, ‘Mooney’s gonna have all our asses if we don’t come up with something, soon. Four days following this maybe girl friend around.’

‘She’s his girl friend. No maybe about it.’

‘She’s probably got the flu, picked up some nose drops,’ James said.

‘Maybe not,’ George said. ‘Lookee here.’

The garage door was slowly rising.

‘Take it,’ Eliza said. ‘Block the driveway so she can’t get out.’

James threw the Olds in reverse and backed crazily down the street. He screeched to a stop in front of the driveway just as the Mercedes started out. Eliza was out of the car on the run.

Jonathan Caldwell was in the car with Ellen Delaney. Ellen Delaney put the stick in reverse and headed back into the garage, but Eliza ran alongside the car and into the garage before the door swooshed shut.

There they were. A Mexican stand-off. Caldwell, who had once been a middleweight boxer at Harvard, glared at her through the windshield, his ice-blue eyes afire with anger. Eliza glared back.

‘You’re trespassing,’ he said finally his voice trembling with rage.

‘Mr Caldwell, do you know who I am?’

‘I know who you are,’ he said flatly.

‘Mr Caldwell, nobody’s heard yon side of this mess. I’ll make a deal. I’ll give you five minutes. You can say anything you want.’

‘And if I refuse?’

Eliza stared at him and said nothing for a moment. Then she smiled. ‘You wouldn’t do that. You’re too smart to pass up five minutes of free air time.’

He nodded toward his girl friend. ‘She’s out of it. It’s just you and me.’

‘You got it.’

When the garage doors opened up again, a minute or two later, the boys were facing it. George had the video camera on his shoulder and James was plugged in and they were ready to shoot. They knew their Eliza very well.

2

At the same time that Eliza was interviewing Caldwell, it was night in Japan.

Kei guided the old Toyota up a gravel road, winding through a row of wind-bent pine trees, and when he peaked the mountain, the city of Tokyo twinkled below them, fifteen miles away, like a constellation reflected in the sea. They were in a parking lot filled with Mercedes and Rolls-Royce sedans, American limousines and, here and there, a Z series Datsun. The building was round and triple-tiered and very contemporary, constructed of teak and redwood that had been steam curved, with balconies that spanned half its circumference and jutted out over the cliffs, facing the city. The main entrance was on the opposite side of the building, and as Kei pulled up, the largest Oriental that Gruber had ever seen emerged from the entrance, itself a massive twelve-foot-high teak door, several inches thick and trimmed in royal blue. The doorman, who helped Gruber out of the back seat, was built like a prize fighter and dressed in a classic gi of black silk.

‘I park, come right back,’ Kei said, and drove around to the side of the building, squeezing the four-door in between two large black European limos. He was slender and agile and handsome in a stoic way, and he wore American jeans, Nike sneakers, a dark-blue raw-silk blouse, and a black headband to keep his thick black hair in place. He was maybe twenty-seven or -eight and crowding five-six.

When Kei returned, Gruber was standing in the shadows near the entrance. He was obviously angry. Gruber was a large man who kept himself in perfect physical condition, his waist tight and trim, his back as straight as a post, his graying brown hair neat and militantly close-cropped. Kei felt tension emanating from Gruber like an electric charge; his skin was as gray as lead and one could almost see, reflected in his lifeless eyes, a lifetime of killing without remorse or feeling.

‘Look, I don’t like the vay dis iss sizing up,’ Gruber said in a low, flat monotone, barely concealing his German accent.

‘You understand my meaning? Don’t leave me alone like dat.

I am on alien ground.’

‘Hunh?’ Kei said.

Goddamn, Gruber thought, fighting his thin temper, it’s always difficult dealing with Orientals. ‘You, me, stay togedder, now on. Okay? You understand dat?’

‘Sure,’ Kei said. ‘Now, you understand this, this is private club, some Japanese, mostly Americans and Europeans who live in Japan. I have guest letter, very hard to get, pay twenty-five thousand yen, you gimme fifty bucks American, that’s twelve thousand yen, so you owe me another thirteen thousand, right?’

‘I told you, if dis girl knows Chameleon and I get vat I need, I’ll triple what you get, eh. Three times, okay? Dat’s anodder thirty-nine thousand. But only if I find Chameleon. If it is a vashout, nutting.’

Kei nodded. ‘Agreeable. You listen good now. There is show on inside, but we have no time for that.’

‘What kind of show?’

‘I tell you there is no time for show You wanna see show, we come back some other time, you must go to the baths, take steam bath to prepare you for the massage. The maiko who massages you, she will be the one.’

‘Maiko? Vat the hell’s dat?’

‘She is training for geisha.’

‘An amateur, eh. Does she have a name?’

‘Her name is Suji. She knows what you want. She will start the talk, hai? So you will know it is her. You just listen. But must hurry, before show is over. There may be crowd after show. Suji will not talk with others there.’

‘So, vy de steam bath? I do not even like de steam bath.’

‘This is very traditional club, even though pretty crazy, too. It would be an insult, to skip the steam.’

Gruber muttered something in German and followed Kei into a small, low-ceilinged anteroom that was simple and elegant. The muted lighting came from a globe lantern that hung over either end of a priceless antique desk, its facade covered with hand-carved scroll work. An Oriental rug lay before the desk, and in the tokonama, the small alcove behind it, was a magnificent floral arrangement. The geisha who sat behind the desk was just as elegant, a diminutive woman, no more than twenty, a single jade ring on the small finger of her left hand, her mouth a splash of red in her chalk-white painted face, her night-black hair braided to one side and held in place by a splinter-thin pin with a delicate jade handle. She wore a kimono of pure white silk with a startling, blood-red obi that matched, perfectly, the colour of her lips. And when she spoke, her voice was as delicate as wind chimes.

‘Konbanwa.’

Kei nodded and returned her ‘Good evening.’

She smiled and nodded back. ‘Tegami o onegai itashimasu.’

‘Hai.’ Kei produced a letter and handed it to her.

‘Domo arigato gozaimasu.’

‘Do itashimashite.’

She read it slowly.

Somewhere in the vastness of the club, behind walls and doors, Gruber could hear the slow, solitary beat of a taiko drum, and there was a delicate scent of incense in the air. And while Gruber tried to keep his mind n business, he found himself uncontrollably stirred by the place, by a sensual promise he could not ignore.

This is business, he said to himself. The pleasure can wait. And yet the odour, the slow rhythmic thump of the drum, the beauty of the young geisha, kept chipping away at his concentration.

When she finished the letter, she looked at Gruber for a moment and then asked Kei, ‘Kochira wa Gruber-san desuka?

‘Hai.’

She folded the letter and slipped it into one of the desk drawers, looked briefly at Gruber, and with the vaguest of smiles, nodded toward another door, pressing a button under her foot as she did. The door clicked very quietly. Kei opened it and ushered Gruber into Takan Shu.

The only light in the enormous space seemed to come from near the ceiling, but it was so subtle, so subdued that it took Gruber a few moments to adjust before he could study the interior of the club. It was an arena, a. plush arena in a large circular room towering sixty feet to its flat ceiling. The core of the main floor was a small stage and, stretching out from it, like ripples in the water, were tiers, circular rows, like giant steps rising one above the other, to a point perhaps halfway to the dome. There were no windows. Each step accommodated several bays separated only by small tables. There were no lamps and no lights on the walls, and in each of the bays were deeply piled futon, thick down quilts normally used for sleeping. Most of the alcoves were occupied, some by a single couple, some by as many as six people. Their faces were hazy apparitions in the dim light.

The music, a Japanese love song, was being played by three geishas who sat on the stage in the centre of the room. When Kei and Gruber entered, the only sound had been the slow rhythm of the taiko, and a murmur of anticipation from the crowded room. But then the drum had been joined by the samisen, the three-stringed Japanese guitar that always sounds slightly out of tune, and then, a beat or two later, by a flute.

Gruber, despite his profession, had managed through the years to acquire an element of taste and had once played the role of interior decorator as a cover. He thought, the place is a marvel of naked elegance; everything in the room is essential. And: Those goddamn Japs, you must give it to them, they have impeccable taste.

It was a few moments before Gruber was aware that everyone in the room was staring up at the ceiling, sixty feet above, at a large plexiglass disk, at least twelve feet across, that was being lowered slowly. It was perfectly balanced by four velvet ropes attached, ten feet above the disk, to a single strand that rose to a winch hidden somewhere in the false ceiling.

Coloured lights faded up slowly as the clear disk was lowered. He was looking up through the disk. It was occupied by two men and a woman. The men were both Japanese but quite disparate in age. One of them was no more than twenty or twenty-one; the other in his forties. Both looked like athletes, their muscular bodies enhanced by oil. They wore loincloths. The woman was Caucasian with perhaps a strain of Polynesian, young, not yet twenty, and small, although her body was almost perfect, her breasts not too big, 1er legs not too short. She wore a loose, sheer tunic that draped to mid-thigh. Both men were blindfolded with black silk. She was not.

And he thought, Ah, even the show will be a study in elegance of style.

Pornographic? Of course. But never obscene.

As the disk came down, very slowly, it began to revolve just as slowly. And the two men began to caress the woman, each in his own way. The younger man was more impetuous, his touch was more urgent, his moves more direct. The older man began to stroke her with his fingertips, starting at the tip of her fingers and moving slowly up her arm, fondling the hollow where her arm and body joined, moving down her side to her knee, then as he started back up, he slipped one hand along the inside of her thigh. Her head fell back and her long black hair draped across the back of her legs. She began to move her head back and forth with the beat of the music.

Must go now,’ Kei said.

The German had begun to sweat, very lightly, just under his nose. ‘In a moment,’ he snapped under his breath without taking his eyes off the revolving disk.

The tempo of the music began to pick up, and with it, the emotions of the trio. The younger man began to slow his pace as the older one increased his. The woman was being touched by four hands that seemed to explore every inch of her body, caressing her ear lobes, her eyelids, her lips, her throat.

She was swaying back and forth and the men moved closer and began weaving with her, their hands overlapped, the tempo of the music increased and she moved with it. The faster the music, the more frenzied she became.

Gruber appeared to be transfixed. He stared up at the disk. His lips were dry and now drops of sweat appeared along the edge of his hairline.

Everything is possible here, he thought. It is hard to tell where reality stops and fantasy begins.

The older man’s hand slid up under her tunic and began rubbing her stomach while the younger man’s hands encircled her breasts, never quite touching them, but tracing the outline of each through the thin gauze. She leaned back on her arms and looked down at her body and she rose slightly so the older man’s hand could slide low on her belly and he turned the hand so the fingers pointed downward and slid his hand lightly between her legs.

She moaned and the audience reacted immediately. A murmur of whispers flooded the room.

Gruber was hooked. Kei, standing nearby in the darkness, studied his reaction, his dry lips, the sweat on his face, his eyes, gleaming as he watched the performance.

She moved in unison with the hand of the older man, sliding forward on it, rising slightly, letting him taunt her with his palm just barely touching her hair. The younger man finally brushed a hand across one of her nipples, then the other, and finally she reached up and pulled the straps of her tunic loose and it fell away. And then she straightened up and began stroking both her lovers and they grew under her touch.

Kei touched Gruber’s elbow and whispered, ‘We must go now. Show over soon.’

‘Rate dey are going, dey vill be up dere for weeks,’ Gruber said. His blood was pounding in unison with the music.

‘We can come back later, see another show. Maybe tomorrow night.’

‘A minute more,’ Gruber whispered with irritation.

‘Okay, pal, it’s your grave.’

‘The expression,’ said Gruber without moving his eyes from the disk, ‘iss funeral. it iss your funeral, dat iss the expression.’

All three of the performers had become extremely vocal. The woman put her hand on the older man’s land, guiding it deeper and deeper.

Kei was not watching the show. He stared off across the room somewhere into a dark corner, waiting.

The disk was now below the line of sight of the people in the top row. The young woman’s moves were becoming spastic. Her tight jaw line was etched in the spotlights. Every muscle in her body was taut. Suddenly she tore the older man’s loin cloth away and he sprang free and she began stroking him and both men eased her down and they lay down beside her and began kissing her breasts, her stomach, her thighs, and a tight scream burst from her clenched teeth.

‘Pretty soon too late,’ Kei whispered

‘Au right, all right,’ the German growled, and Kei led him to a doorway at the side of the arena. They entered what appeared to be a large closet with a single blue light in the ceiling. A second door faced them.

‘Vait a minute,’ Gruber whispered. ‘Vere are you taking me?’

‘It’s okay,’ Kei said. ‘Health club right there, other side of door. Don’t want light in the club, okay.’

He pulled the door shut. The music continued achingly in Gruber’s mind, although the door was thick and he could really only feel the beat of the drum now. But his concentration was shattered and he was having difficulty making the transition from fantasy back to reality. Kei opened the other door and light flooded the small room. A half-dozen steps led down to a narrow hallway which was painted a dazzling white. Its indirect lighting was so bright it was hard to tell where walls and floors joined. Now even the beat of the music was a memory. But the scene was etched in Gruber’s brain and he could not dismiss the fantasy that continued to play out in his mind.

Kei led the big German to one of the doors and ushered him into an immaculate dressing room with six teakwood lockers and a long teak bench. Kei pointed to a door directly across the hail. ‘Steam bath. Door on other side of steam room leads to massage room, okay?’

Gruber was getting nervous again.

‘Vere are you going?’ he demanded.

‘When you finish, Suji will show you exit door. I will wait for you there,’ Kei said and was gone.

The little son of a bitch, Gruber thought, he is probably going back up to see the end of the show.

Gruber took off his clothes, hanging them neatly in the locker, and draped his shoulder holster over a hook in its side and wrapped a towel around his middle and tucked it in place. His body was hard and his skin tight and there were two round scars in his side, .38-caliber scars, constant reminders that once, in another time and place, he had become dangerously reckless.

He stared at himself in the mirror for a few moments and then looked down at the scars. His mind was like the blip in an electronic game, bouncing back and forth, from the arena above, to the woman on the other side of the steam bath who supposedly would lead him to Chameleon.

Almost as an afterthought, he took the .25-caliber Beretta from the shoulder holster, held the small gun in the palm of his hand, and checked the clip, then tucked it into the towel at his waist. He draped a second towel over his shoulders, letting it fall at his side to conceal the pistol. He entered the steam room.

It was like being lost in a cloud. He had never seen steam so thick. Gruber groped his way along the wall to the benches on one side and sat down. Driblets of sweat trickled down and began to gather at his waist in the tuck of the towel. He took the Beretta and laid it on the bench beside him.

The room was larger than Gruber had expected. He could vaguely make out its perimeters from the haloed glow of the lights recessed in the walls.

God, he thought, it must be a hundred and twenty degrees in here. I’ll give it two or three minutes and then get the hell out.

He took the towel from his shoulders and dipped it in a bucket of ice that sat melting on the floor near the wall and wiped his face with it.

The sound of a sudden shower of water, followed immediately by a harsh burst of steam, jolted him. It came from across the room. Someone had just pulled the cord and released a water shower on the hot coals that wore obviously over there somewhere on the other side of the room.

The mist swirled and grew thicker.

To his right, he heard the other door open and thunk shut.

His hand edged closer to the Beretta. He was jumpy, his pulse still hammering from the opening minutes of the show in the arena above.

Then the mist on the far side of the room seemed to clear for a moment and he saw briefly, as though through gauze, the shaggy figure of a man, staring at him.

It jolted him. He sat upright, instantly alert. But the steam immediately obscured the figure. He took the Beretta in hand and stood up and took a few cautious steps across the slippery tile floor toward the figure. Was he large or small? Fat or thin? Gruber wasn’t sure.

He sensed, but never actually saw, the figure. It materialized for an instant, tore off his towel and ‘vanished back into the mist. The Beretta clattered on the floor. Gruber stood in the room, naked. Panic began to gnaw at his stomach. He bent his knees and lowered himself slowly down toward the gun, peering into the thickening mist.

Another hiss of steam from across the room. It distracted him for a moment. The kick came from nowhere, a sudden jarring pain from out of the mist, bang! Just like that.

He didn’t see who kicked him, didn’t even hear it coming. But he felt the heel rip into his side, felt the ribs crack and the tendons tear loose. His feet thrashed from under him and he went down on his side, sliding across the tiled floor, and hit the wall.

All of his finely tuned systems went haywire for a moment. Then he twisted his body, ignoring the fire in his side, got quickly to his knees, and waving the pistol in front of him, pointing at everything and nothing, he stood up, keeping his back against the wall.

He hardly had time to appraise the situation.

The second time it was the toes, hard as a cake of ice, that came from nowhere into the pit of his stomach, digging up deep into his diaphragm, slamming him into the wall. He gagged as the air gushed out of him, and the back of his throat soured instantly with bile.

He jack-knifed forward, caught himself with his hands, the Beretta still clutched in a sweaty fist, and rolled away from the wall, seeking the sanctity of the thick steam himself.

As he started to get up, he caught a fleeting glimpse of something, a spectre that seemed to materialize just long enough to shatter the right side of his jaw, before it was enveloped once again in mist.

The pain screamed out along his nerves and flooded his brain. This time he screamed, but as he fell, he swung the Beretta up and got off one shot, its flat spang echoing off the walls.

Karate.

Traditional.

Okinawan.

What was the best defensive stance possible under the— Whap!

He felt his wrist snap, saw the black pistol spin away into the fog, heard it smack the floor and slide into a corner.

He spun quickly in the direction of the blow.

Nothing but swirling clouds of hot steam.

He was beginning to shake. Sweat was gushing from every pore in his body. His breath came in laboured gulps. He turned and lurched for the door.

His feet were swept from under him, soundlessly, effortlessly, invisibly. He fell flat on the wet floor, his broken jaw smacked the wet tile, fire raged in his ribs, his ruined hand was folded uselessly under him.

Groaning uncontrollably, he was fighting to stay conscious. He decided to stay down until he could get some strength back. The ice bucket was a few inches from his good hand.

He rolled slowly on the other side and inched across the floor until he got a grip on the handle and rose very slowly to his knees, his eyes darting fearfully in their sockets, his ears straining for any sound of warning. Pain warped his judgment.

He had to get out of the room. The door was behind him and perhaps six or seven feet away, lost in the haze. Gruber backed toward it, swinging the ice bucket in wide arcs, growling like a hurt animal.

The chop came from behind and separated his left shoulder. The ice bucket soared from his hand and hit the benches nearby. Ice showered down around him.

He was helpless, his left arm and right hand useless and needled with pain, his jaw hanging crookedly, his side swollen and red.

‘You son of a bitch,’ he groaned hoarsely, partly in English, partly in German, ‘show yourself.’ But he was washed up and his nerves began to short-circuit and then everything went, and shaking uncontrollably, he collapsed against the bench.

From the other side of the room a voice said, in perfect English: ‘Be out of Japan by five tomorrow afternoon.’

The Beretta, from out of the fog, slithered to his feet. The clip was gone.

Gruber heard the door open, felt the cold rush of air from across the room.

‘Bon voyage,’ the voice said, and the door banged shut.

3

It was four-thirty in the afternoon and the news room was, as usual, the capital of Pandemonia. One of the editing machines was down and Mooney was getting a rubber ear from listening to all the complaints and excuses, an& the phone rang and Mooney snatched it up and snapped, ‘Forget it!’

Eula, his secretary, wisely replied, ‘Unh unh.’

And Mooney said, surprised, Unh unh?’

And Eula said, ‘It’s God.’

Mooney groaned. ‘Aw shit!’

Just what he needed. God, of all people. The Hare Krishna of all Hare Krishnas, owner of the moon , the stars and the rest of the universe, as well as the Boston Star, five radio stations and three TV affiliates, including the one for which he, Harold Claude Mooney, was Director of the News Department. Not News Director. Director of the News Department. Big difference, especially at Channel 6 in Boston. God, otherwise known as Charles Gordon Howe, among other things, was a fanatic about chain of command and titles. To Howe the title was almost as important as the job. Howe had once explained this philosophy at a rare meeting of his executives: ‘People are immediately intimidated by titles. It takes them a while to size up a person. But the title, the title gets ‘em every time. It says “Here’s the power,” bang, just like that.’

Well, Howe had the title. The Chairman. Not chairman of the board. The Chairman. An hour and a half from showtime, ninety minutes until the daily Circus Maximus, The Six O’Clock News had a stick in his mouth and was staring down his throat and who’s on the phone? The fucking Chairman.

He put a smile in his voice before he answered. ‘Mr Howe? Hal Mooney here.’

‘Mr Mooney, I know you’re probably wishing some kind of strange voodoo curse on me for calling you right now, but I want five minutes of your time. Then I’ll let you get back to work.’

‘Five minutes, sir? Okay, shoot.’

‘I want five minutes on Eliza Gunn. Sum her up for me. I’ll time you.’

‘Right now? Are you starting the clock this minute?’ Mooney said and chuckled, although he knew Howe was probably sitting on the other end of the line with a stop watch in his hand.

‘Right now.’

Mooney glanced idly at the clock over his office door, thought for a few seconds and started. ‘One of the best investigative reporters I’ve ever known. She uses it all, whatever it takes. She can be adorable if getting it takes adorable. She can also be serious if it takes serious, or funny if it takes funny, or heart—warming, or cold-blooded, or meaner than a goddamn cobra with tonsillitis, if that’s what it takes. Point is, she gets it. She’s Joe Namath his first year with the Jets. Every throw’s gotta be a winner.

‘The first thing comes to my mind is the cross-eyed tiger. She called it a hunch. I call it instinct, pure instinct, without which a reporter’s a dancer with a broken leg.

‘Thing is, it took me a little while at first, y’know, to see it. At first I figure she’s just cute, a little ditzy. I used her on light stuff.

‘But that tiger story, that was a doozie. The rest of the stations were treating it as a humour piece, y’know, a kicker. I mean, what the hell, how else you gonna treat a story about a cross-eyed tiger named Betsy Ross ho’s getting her eyes uncrossed? So everybody gets stuff on the tiger going into the operating room and the doctor talking about the operation, like that. Then they split.

‘Not her. She hangs in there. I even told her to leave the damn zoo. There was stuff fast-breaking all over town that day.

“I got a hunch,” she says.

“Whaddya mean?” I says.

“You know what a hunch is, for Chrissakes,” she says

‘I feel like a dodo. I got this five-foot, ninety-eight-pound twenty-two-year-old asking me do I know what a hunch is and me in the business — what, twenty years? Almost as long as she is old.

“Look,” I says, “I got shit busting all over the place, I’m the news director, get your ass in the van and get over to” — hell, I don’t even remember where.

‘Now, she’s on staff maybe two, three months at the time, she’s a goddamn receptionist before that, I’m the expert, she’s nothin’ short of an intern, so who’s the boss, besides, what does she know, right?

‘Wrong.

‘She says, “I don’t trust these assholes” — she talks like a longshoreman by the by—and I says, “What assholes?” and she says, “The vets,” and I says, “Isn’t this like three expert tiger doctors they got Out there?,” and she says, “I don’t give a shit if it’s the top vet, he’s got a funny look in his eye. Trust me.”

“Trust me”!

‘I’m looking the Six O’Clock News dead in the eye three hours away and she wants to tie up a camera crew, herself and a van on a hot news day because the tiger doctor has a funny look in his eye.

‘I make a little joke. I says to her, “Not as funny as the look in the tiger’s eye, ho, ho, ho,” and she gets pissed, starts giving me all this jazz about this tiger, how it’s real valuable because it has white under the black stripes inst.ead of yellow and how they’re just doing the operation to make the tiger even more valuable and then the zoo’s gonna sell it to some Arab king for some enormous amount of money and on top of that the vet’s in for some big fee.

‘A tiger, for God’s sakes.

“Get your ass outa there now,” I say s, and she says, I swear to God, she says, “Bullshit!’ And she kills the connection. Not only that, she leaves the damn phone off the hook and I’m ready to kill her and I’m dictating a memo canning her ass and at five-thirty she bombs in the door and the tiger is dead on the operating table and this big-time vet has fucked up royally and the zoo people are freaking out all over the place, and she’s got this hotshot doctor with his balls hanging out trying to get off the hook explaining why the tiger died and all they were trying to do was fix its eyes, and there isn’t another newsman within twenty miles and the next thing I know Cronkite’s people are on the horn looking for a national pickup and we get more phone calls from that one goddamn story, for Chrissakes, than anything I can remember.

‘That lady has instincts. And that’s the name of the game. I have never argued with her since. And she’s never let me down.’

‘She seems very good at finding people,’ Howe said quietly. ‘People who don’t want to be found, that is.’

‘It’s far from the first time. Take Tomatoes Garziola. Just before that mess between Garziola and the Feds blew up. In fact, she kind of fired the first shot in that war. An assistant DA named Flannagan had made some comments at a luncheon about Garziola and everybody was looking for him, except Garziola wasn’t that anxious to be found.

‘But Lizzie decided, by God she was gonna find him, so she pulled his package and was going through the stuff and found a reference to Garziola’s mother. Lo and behold, it’s the old lady’s birthday. So she and a crew head down to Providence, which is where the old lady lives, and Lizzie cruises up to the door, and sure enough, there’s Tomatoes with half a dozen of his gorillas, having dinner.

‘Thing is, she kept calling him Tomatoes to his face. I mean, the last time anybody called Garziola Tomatoes to his face, they floated up under the Atlantic Street pier. Did you see the original tape? Here comes Garziola out of his old lady’s front door with a look on his face would make the whole front line of the Dallas Cowboys wet their pants and he stares down at her and says, “I don’t pick on ladies, okay, particularly they don’t weigh twenty pounds soakin’ wet, but I could make an exception in your case, sister.”

‘She looks up with that fifty-dollar smile, says, “The DA, Flannagan, is making a fool of you, Mr Tomatoes, I just thought you’d like to get your side of the story on the record,” and he starts laughing and he turns around to these four apes behind him, says, “Mr Tomatoes!” and he’s laughing so, of course they all start laughing, too, and then he says, “Whaddya talkin’ about?,” and she says, “Mr Flannagan has publicly accused you of graft and kickbacks and hijacking and even a little murder here and there,” and Garziola looks down at her again and says, “Why, that little son of a bitch, on my mother’s birthday, too,” and she says, real tough like, “Yeah, on your mother’s birthday,” and then without even a breath in between she says, “Why do they call you Tomatoes?,” and the next thing you know, Garziola’s sitting there on his mother’s stoop telling her all about how it was on the docks in the old days when he was getting started and how’ they used to hold up off-loading the produce until the tomatoes were rotten and finally the owners started knuckling under and that’s when they started getting a living wage and that is where the name Tomatoes came from.

‘Forty-five minutes later he’s still talking and then he puts the cork in the bottle and says, “Look, little lady, when it comes to kickbacks and the old payola, the first one’s got his paw out is that little schmuck, Flannagan. You want a story, I’ll give you a story,” and his lawyer’s standing there trying to shush him up and he’s telling everybody get lost and he gives her book, chapter, verse on what turned out to be one of the juiciest scandals in years. I’m not saying she broke the story — I mean, in the long run it all had to come out — but we got it first, and that’s the name of the game. Your papers got most of the mileage out of it, but you saw it first on Channel Six and she’s the one started the river flowing. That time it took adorable.

She was adorable. See what I mean?’

‘Sum her up in one word.’

Mooney thought for a few moments. ‘Tenacious,’ he said.

‘Thank you very much, Mr Mooney..’

‘Anytime, sir. She’s not in trouble, is she?’

‘If she were, Mr Mooney, she wouldn’t be anymore. Not after that accolade. And by the way, congratulations on being number one in the ratings again this period.’

‘Thanks. Thanks a lot.’

‘Goodbye, Mr Mooney. Thank you for your time.’

Click.

Just like that. What in the hell was the old bastard up to? If he steals her away from me for some other station, Mooney said to himself, I think what I’ll do, I’ll go over his house and kill the son of a bitch.

II

She got off on four, a floor below the studio, and ran down the hail to the editing room. Eddie, the best editor at the station, was waiting for her. Good old reliable Eddie.

‘You’re a dream,’ she said and kissed him solidly on the top of his bald black head.

‘Anytime. What’ve you got?’

‘An exclusive interview with Jonathan Caldwell.’

‘Are you kiddin’?’

‘It’s all right there,’ she said, pointing to the video cassettes.

Eddie whistled softly through his teeth. ‘How in hell did you swing that?’

‘I nailed him, Eddie. I’ve been following that cute little girl friend of his for four days, and today she led me right to him. What time is it?’

‘Four forty-five.’

‘Shit, just a little over an hour... Okay, let’s put together five minutes and I’ll bend Tubby’s arm to get the extra air time.’

‘Okay, but I better leave you a thirty-second outtake, just in case he holds you to your usual time. That way we won’t have to make any last-minute cuts.’

‘He can’t do that. . . this is a hot break. Everybody in town’s been after Caldwell since he got indicted. And I’ve got him... exclusive.’

‘Hey, baby, you don’t have to convince me. You got to convince Tubby Slocum.’

By five-ten she had her show together and was ready to write the intro and close. She went up to the fifth floor and found Vicki, the floor manager, talking to a human mountain.

Tubby Slocum made even George look like a dwarf. He was six-four and weighed somewhere in the neighbourhood of three hundred and fifty pounds, a great deal of it resting dead centre.

His enormous belly sagged over his belt, his pants hung as full as an Arab tent from his global stomach, his neck swelled out over a shirt that had to be opened three buttons down to accommodate it. His thinning hair, combed in strands from one ear to the other, was always damp with sweat, and when he spoke, his voice, squeezing up through that enormous hulk, wheezed out, like a chipmunk in a Walt Disney movie.

Slocum had inherited his bulk with his job. He had always been ample, but he had become obese in the past four years. Those who disliked him attributed his five-year tenure as producer of both the six and eleven o clock news to the fact that he was a shameless sycophant t Raymond Pauley, the station manager. Fat or not, sycophant or not, he was still the toughest, hardest-driving and best news producer in Boston. Channel 6 had dominated both time slots since he took over. And as long as he stayed number one, Pauley didn’t give a damn how fat he was.

Eliza looked up at him like Hillary appraising Mount Everest. ‘Tubby, I’ve got a hot one,’ she said.

‘You always got a hot one, Lizzie. What is—’

‘It’s E-liza, Tubby.’

‘Right. So what’s so hot?’

‘I’ve got Jonathan Caldwell on tape. Five goddamn good minutes, Tubby...’

‘Your spot’s five minutes, kiddo,’ the big man said, walking laboriously toward the control room. ‘Not four fifty-nine or five-oh-one. Five minutes. Now, if you can run it without any intro and close — great.’

‘Listen to me, Tub. It’s really strong stuff. I’ve got him saying that the only way to do business with the Arabs is through bribery. I’ve got him admitting to several flagrant violations of the Fed banking laws. He says he’s a victim of the times and he says he expects to go to jail and that all the banks do the same thing and the Federal Reserve people are just making an example of him.’

‘Sounds like dynamite. You’ve got five minutes.’

‘Dammit, Tubby...’

‘Hey, you got problems? I got a lot more, okay. I got three teenagers dead out in Lynn in a head—on, a former Secretary of State lost at sea on his sailboat, a Harvard doctor who thinks he can cure cancer with a mixture of prune juice and asparagus, and I haven’t even started on what’s going on outside Boston. You got five minutes, Eliza. Five.’ He held up five chubby fingers and vanished into the control room.

She called the editing room.

‘Well?’ Eddie asked.

‘That son of a bitch.’

‘Four minutes on tape, right?’

‘Yeah, I guess. I need at least thirty seconds to get in and thirty to get out of the interview.’

‘No problem, lady. We got two thirty-second options we can pull out.’

‘I hate to lose that stuff — where he’s talking about being a victim of the times — but everything else is so good.’

‘Go write your stuff; it’s twenty of. I’ll edit the tape and get it on Max.’ Max was the nickname given to the computer that controlled all the tape feeds on a program.

‘Thanks.’

She went back to her office and started writing.

Ten minutes. There was never enough time. She scribbled out a first draft, threw it away, and started pecking out her intro and close on the typewriter.

The phone rang. It was the monitor typist. She needed copy.

‘Two minutes,’ Liza barked and hung up.

She went back to the typewriter and finished the second draft.

The phone rang again. She snatched it up and said, ‘On the way,’ pulled the sheet out of the typewriter and ran down the hail to the crib setter.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

The gal who set the type for the monitor was never in a hurry. ‘It’s okay, you got the tag story, just before the editorial. I got plenty of time.’

As Liza was leaving the room, a secretary called to her, ‘Phone call, Liza. It’s urgent.’

‘Not now, Sally, it’s two minutes to six. I can’t take it, get a number, please.’

‘I think you’ll want to take this one. . . it’s Mr Howe. Charles Gordon Howe, two minutes before air time. She went into Sally’s office and picked it up. ‘Hello?’ ‘Miz Gunn, this is Charles Gordon Howe.’

‘Mr Howe, it’s less than a minute to air time and I’ve got a very hot story working and I really don’t have time right now to-,

‘I’m aware of the time. I wouldn’t be calling if it wasn’t a matter of urgency. It is my station, Miz Gunn.’

‘Right, Mr Howe, but it’s my career. Call me back at six thirty-one. Bye.’

She started back out the door. ‘Thanks, Sal.’

‘Sister, you got more guts than a gladiator,’ Sally said. Eliza headed for the studio.

III

It was out. He was going to fight. The Gunn interview would leave little doubt about that.

Caldwell stared out the window of his office, a bright, cheery room, its walls covered with abstract paintings, and watched the shells, thirty floors below and half a mile away, gliding across the placid Charles River, and his mind drifted back to one glorious day when he had helped row Harvard to an unexpected victory over Yale. But the dream passed quickly and he took off his suit jacket, pulled down his tie and wearily climbed the circular iron stairway that led to the penthouse apartment on the floor above.

He would write a statement and tell the whole story in his own words. For days he had been writing and rewriting it in his head. The allegations were false, but if the examiners dug deep enough, there were other things.

The penthouse was much warmer than Caldwell’s office. Two bedrooms, two baths, a small kitchen and a large living room, with floor to ceiling windows that gave him an unrestricted view to the north, east and south. The apartment had been decorated by Tessie Caldwell, who knew her husband’s taste well. The furniture was strictly antique, the drapes yellow and white. Plants abounded, and against the wall between the bedroom doors was the only painting iii the room, a six-foot- high Jackson Pollock, its dizzying colours dominated by yellow. A secretary dating back to Daniel Webster stood near the sliding glass doors leading out to a wraparound balcony.

Caldwell was so engrossed in deep inner conflict that he did not see the visitors until the older one spoke: Hello, Johnny, you had us worried.’

The voice was soft, textured by the South but not of the South, a voice that Caldwell knew could be reassuring one minute and patronizing the next. It belonged to Senator Lyle Damerest, a grandfather of a figure with white hair that flowed down over the collar of his tweed jacket, a bow tie and a gnarled shillelagh to support a game leg from a slight and unpublicized stroke. He was the senior Senator from Virginia and the country’s ranking congressman in terms of longevity. For thirty-one years he had represented his state. He had been on two Cabinets, was head of the Armed Services Committee, and had more back-room power than any living legislator. He was consulted on major issues by Democrat and Republican alike. Nobody, not even the President, would risk scorning Darner-

The man with him was virtually nondescript: medium tall, medium heavy, blond, crew-cut hair, dark-gray Suit, no distinguishing features. He held a zip-open briefcase under one arm.

Ya needn’t worry. We took the private elevator. No one saw us come up,’ the senator said.

What the hell are you doing here?’ Caldwell asked.

1 was a hop and a skip away. Somebody heard you’d surfaced and called me.’

No, I mean what’re you doing in Boston?’

Been up here for the last two days. On the q.t., been stayin’ with friends. We’ve been worried about you.’

You said that. And who’s “we”? And who are you?’ He looked at the nondescript man.

This is Ralph Simpson. Federal marshal.’

How d’ya do, sir,’ Simpson said.

Caldwell nodded to him.

‘He’s got the subpoena,’ Damerest went on.

‘What subpoena?’

‘You’ve been subpoenaed to go in for questioning. No charges, yet. If they come, it’ll be the Fed. Violation of the government banking statutes. What I’m tellin’ ya, laddie, it can be avoided.’

‘Really?’

‘All your friends are behind you, Johnny. I’ve talked to the boys on the banking committee and to the federal judge here. I think the way this can be handled, the judge will recommend that the entire matter be investigated by the House committee. The whole thing will blow over. Ya just need to bite the bullet for now.’ The old man smiled, but his flinty eyes narrowed.

‘I don’t think so,’ Caldwell said.

‘Oh? And why not?’

‘I don’t intend to be a whipping boy.’

“‘Whipping boy” is it!’

‘That’s the way it feels.’

Damerest stood with his hands thrust deep in his pants pockets, his shoulders hunched up under his ears, leaning slightly toward Caldwell, as if about to make a point to the Ways and Means Committee. ‘Shit, son, you just got on the wrong side of the old farts on Wall Street. We can unruffle their feathers.’

‘The hell with ‘em. They been down on First Common since my grandfather ran the show.’

‘I know, son. Your father and I were classmates together. He footed the bill for my first campaign. I couldn’t of raised scratch feed without him.’

Caldwell had heard the stories many times since he was a kid. ‘The bastards were after him, now they’re after me. Besides, I didn’t always agree with Dad, you know that. I won’t put up with any heat right now. None of us can afford it.’

The old senator smiled, that warm, grandfather smile that hid the heart of a vulture. Caldwell had watched him smile his way out of more than one tight spot. Now the old bastard was using it on him. Easy,’ the senator said quietly. ‘They got your balls in the doorjamb for the moment.’

‘Bullshit. Why did it happen?’

‘It got by me.

Nothing gets by you, Lyle. Nothing this big.’

‘What can I say.’ The old man took out a red bandanna and wiped his forehead. ‘Good God, it’s hot in here. You always keep it like this?’

‘The housekeepers do that,’ Caldwell said. He slid open one of the glass partitions and a gust of cold air shook the drapes.

‘Ah, better,’ the senator said. ‘Look, just take a peek at the papers Mr Simpson brought along. It will be handled very quietly. You two can just go down to the Federal Building and...’

Simpson walked over to the antique secretary, opened his briefcase and reached inside.

‘And how about you, Lyle?’ Caldwell said.

‘Hardly appropriate, me goin’ along ‘with ya. I can do a lot more, stayin’ in the background.’

Simpson had both hands in the zip-open briefcase. He unscrewed the cap of a small bottle and tipped its contents into a large ball of cotton he held in his other hand.

Damerest said, ‘I talked to Tessie. She seems to be handling it all very well.’

Simpson took his hands out of the briefcase. The cotton ball was in one hand. He was directly behind Caldwell, who said, ‘She’s used to character assassination. They did everything but burn her father at the stake.’

Simpson stepped close to Caldwell, the hand with the cotton ball behind his back. The senator moved up close to Caldwell.

‘I was very reassurin’,’ he said.

He moved suddenly, wrapping his arms around Caldwell, pinning the banker’s arms to his sides and squeezing him sharply. Air rushed out of Caldwell’s nose and mouth.

‘What in hell—’ Caldwell gasped, but he never finished the sentence. Simpson jammed the cotton against Caldwell’s nose. As he gasped, the acrid odour of chloroform flooded through his head and dulled his brain. He began to thrash, to hold his breath.

The senator clutched him again, harder. Caldwell’s breath gushed out. He gasped again. His brain was paralysed, Damerest could feel him growing limp. He squeezed him again. Caldwell’s eyes bulged and stared over the cotton swab, like those of a terrified animal. Then they went crazy, crossing, uncrossing, finally rolling up under the lids. As Caldwell sagged, Simpson grabbed him around the waist, twisted him sideways and dragged him through the open door to the balcony.

IV

The show was three minutes old when the hot-line phone began flashing. Chuck Graves, the unflappable anchor man, was in the middle of the opening news segment. Eliza picked it up.

‘This is Sid down in the news room. We got a hot flash — Jonathan Caldwell just took a Brodie off the First Common Bank building. He’s all over Market Street. . . We got the Live

Action truck on the way.. . that’s all I know for now.’ The line went dead.

Liza sat like a statue with the phone frozen in her hand. She cradled the receiver quietly for a moment, then she slipped away from the set and ran out to the hallway, grabbed the hotline phone on the wall and dialled the editing room.

‘Is Eddie still there? It’s Eliza, tell him it’s important... Eddie, listen to me — Caldwell just jumped off the bank building... I know, I know... Is it on the chain? Can you get it back long enough to drop those two thirty-second segments back in?. . . Don’t worry, I’ll take full responsibility. . . Eddie, you’re a love...’ She hung up and returned to the set.

They finished two more segments and were into sports before the news room called back and confirmed that it was definitely Caldwell. She gave it to Graves, who made that announcement at the end of the sports segment but he had little else to go with.

Perfect. She had all she needed.

In the booth, the assistant director was counting out of the sports slot. ‘Okay... ready Max ... and three, two, one... and roll tape and kill camera three, kill Wally’s mike ... and camera three on Liza. Jeez, look at her — she’d look great in a garbage bag...’

‘She’s got the best ass in Boston,’ Tubby said wistfully.

‘I’m talking about her face, Tubby — Thirty seconds, get in a bit tighter on Jackson . . . camera one on the weather map.

lookin’ good— You can’t even see her ass, she’s sitting down.’

‘You can sure see it when she stands up,’ Tubby said.

Liza was still scribbling notes to herself, changes she would make from the crib sheet she had already rewritten twice, part of it after she had turned the story in to be typed for the monitor. Her adrenaline was roaring. The AD’s voice crackled in her ear: ‘Ready three on Liza and let me have a voice check on Liza.

‘Hi, my hair is green and my eyes are—’

‘Good, and we have a one-minute cutaway and then back to you, Liza, and you have five minutes before the editorial. We’re running about two seconds ahead right now . .. lookin’ good ... and okay, camera three... and four, three, two, one

you’re on, Liza... and ready Liza’s tape...’

She looked straight into the camera, leaning forward just slightly. ‘Good evening, this is Eliza Gunn with Hotline Report. At five-fifty-eight today, two minutes before we went on the air, Jonathan Caldwell, president and chairman of the board of the nation’s second most powerful banking institution, fell or jumped to his death from the thirty-second floor of the batik his father started sixty years ago. At three o’clock this afternoon, two hours before his death plunge, I interviewed Jonathan Caldwell in a garage in Boston’s North End, talking with him about the scandal that has brought his bank close to failure, and has brought disgrace to one of this country’s most powerful business and political families -..‘

In the control room, the monitor girl said, ‘Man, she’s nowhere near the script. She’s really straying.’

Tubby got restless. ‘Buck, tell the floor director to give her four, three and two minute time cues. If she goes over we’ll lose the editorial and the Old Man’ll chew my ass off.’

‘He’d die of old age before he could finish,’ Buck said and speared his finger into the floor director’s mike button.

‘Very funny,’ Tubby said. He walked to the control board and pressed the loudspeaker button: ‘Liza, cut your close in half ... you went almost twenty seconds over on the intro.’

Buck’s voice came on again as Caldwell’s interview rolled on the monitors: ‘Okay, we’re coming up on thirty seconds on the tape. Remember, keep it short, Liza, we’re very tight. .. And coming up on end of tape ... four, three, two, one. What the hell, the tape’s running long—’

‘Cut it,’ Tubby cried.

‘I can’t cut it now, he’s right in the middle of talking about— Wait a minute, here we go: Ready three ... and ready...’

‘Goddammit, goddamn,’ Tubby bellowed. ‘We’re already forty seconds over! I told her five minutes. Four for the tape and a thirty-second live shot going in and coming out. Pull the plug on her. Get her off there.’

‘I can’t do that, she’s right in the middle of her closeout,’ the AD said.

‘I don’t believe her,’ Tubby boomed.

‘Kill the editorial?’ the AD asked.

Tubby scratched his head frantically.

‘Kill the goddamn editorial. I don’t fucking believe her!’

‘It’s a good shot, Tubby.’

‘I don’t give a doodly fuck if she’s breaking World War III, I gave her five goddamn minutes and look at her.. . she’s acting like she’s doing a thirty-fuckin’-minute sitcom, for Chris- sakes.’

‘She’s closing out now,’ the AD said. He shoved a button. ‘Chuck, we’re right on it, so get out fast. And there she goes

now, four, three, two, and out... and take three, Chuck’s mike...’

In the studio, Graves gave his usual confident smile. ‘And that’s the news,’ he said. ‘Charles Graves, see you at eleven.’

The AD flipped switches and sagged in his chair. ‘That’s a wrap,’ he sighed into the mike.

‘Goddammit!’ Tubby Slocum bellowed. ‘I told her five minutes. Did you see the floor director give her a minute and then thirty seconds? She went right on. A minute and twenty-two seconds over. Goddammit!’ He stormed out of the control room.

Liza gathered up her things and winked at Graves. ‘Nice,’ she said.

Graves smiled. He had been a newsman for twelve years and he knew a good news break when he saw one.

Tubby was waiting for her when she came out of the studio. He waddled along beside her as she took giant steps down the hail toward her office.

‘Dammit,’ the fat man snapped, ‘I told you five minutes. I stretched to give you five minutes. Five ... not six plus.’ His face was the colour of a boiled lobster ‘From now on when I tell ya—’

She stopped and Tubby had to catch himself to keep from running over her.

‘Tubby?’

Yeah?’

‘Was it a good shot?’

‘What’s that got to—’

‘Was it good or not?’

‘That ain’t the point. The point is, I’m the producer of this goddamn show. I can’t have the talent running all over me—’

‘Tubby?’

‘What, for Chrissakes?’

‘Was it a good shot?’

‘So it was a good shot. You know it was a good shot.’

‘Gave you a good show, didn’t it?’

‘Lizzie...’

‘It’s Eliza... E-liza. Bye.’

She blew him a kiss and went into her office, kicking the door shut behind her.

‘Ah, damn,’ Tubby said forlornly. As he turned toward the studio, he yelled back at her door, ‘Being a producer around here is like trying to direct a Broadway show full of deaf-mutes.’

The phone was ringing when she entered the office. She dropped her clipboard and notes on the desk, took a deep breath, stared at the phone and lit a cigarette.

Well, shit, she thought, I can’t avoid it.

She snatched up the phone. ‘Gunn here,’ she snapped.

‘Very nice,’ the voice said. Howe’s voice was a deep, quiet, paternal rumble. He never raised it and he rarely showed anger. He didn’t have to.

‘Look, Mr Howe, I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude...’

‘My dear, I have been a newsman all my life, I didn’t inherit this business, I started it. Myself. I know a good news story when I see one. Although I must say I am deeply sympathetic toward Johnny Caldwell. He was a good friend. That’s not why I called, however. I have an assignment I’d like you to consider.’

She tried to remain calm. Charles Gordon Howe, calling her. ‘An assignment?’

‘Not in your regular line.’

‘You mean it will take me away from the show?’

‘Yes.’

‘For how long?’

‘That really depends a lot on you. Are you free right now? I’ll have my car bring you over.’

‘Look, Mr Howe, I’ve been doing investigative reporting for almost three years and I’ve got a good reputation. To leave the show now...’ She let the sentence hang

‘Mmmm.’ The deep rumble. Seconds of silence. She was getting uncomfortable.

‘I’ve been watching you very closely.,. May I call you Liza?’

‘It’s E-liza, but everybody does.’

‘All right, Eliza. I think you may be the best television reporter I’ve got. That’s why I want to discuss this with you. Of course, there’s a bonus in this—’

‘It’s not the money,’ she said quickly. ‘Well, I mean, of course money is important. It’s just that, people forget you fast. Three months and they won’t know who I am. How long will this take?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Howe said. ‘What do you know about Francis O’Hara?’

‘Frank O’Hara? The reporter?’

‘The same.’

‘Uh ... well, I know he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and passed over. He was in intelligence for several years before he became a reporter. Uh ... he wrote that great series on the CIA for the Washington Post a couple of years ago—’

‘Not bad,’ Howe interrupted.

‘I didn’t know it was a quiz,’ she said.

Howe chuckled. ‘Ray Pauley told me you were a feisty one,’ he said.

‘What about O’Hara’?’ she asked.

‘Let’s settle the question of the bonus. What do you want?’

‘I don’t know the job.’

‘Let’s say. . . You’ll be off the air for two months. What do you feel is an equitable agreement for two months of air time?’

‘1 want a shot at New York . .. or Washington.’

‘You think you’re ready for New York — or Washington?’

‘I know it.’

‘Pauley doesn’t want to lose you.’

‘You asked me, Mr Howe. Don’t you think I’m ready?’

‘Okay, we can talk about it.’

Eliza swallowed hard. Just like that, a shot at New York. But what did she have to do for it? ‘So ... what about Frank O’Hara?’

‘I want you to find him and deliver a message for me.’

‘Find him?’ She laughed. ‘Is he lost?’

‘Precisely, Eliza. He’s been on the run. The CIA’s been trying to kill him for almost a year now.’

4

Kinugasa-yama is a gently sloping mountain on the northern edge of the vast Park of the Shoguns in Kyoto. Along its peak are rows of delicate pine trees, and when the wind is from the west and the pines sway before it, the mountain has the appearance of a lion with a great shaggy mane crouched beside the park as if to protect this, the most venerable place in Japan.

A half mile to the south of the mountain is Tofuku-ji, the tallest and most sacred Shinto shrine in the country. It towers five stories, each story with a roof curved delicately toward heaven, each rooftop representing an element — earth, wind, fire, water and air — and a spire, whose nine rings carved into its shaft represent the nine rings of heaven.

It has been said that the rock garden which lies between Tofuku-ji and the Ryoan-ji temple nearby is the most perfect stone garden in existence and is exactly the same today as it was in the fifteenth century, when it was designed by Shinto priests.

The place was deserted except for an old man who was stooped over a long-handled rake, carefully cleaning and resetting each pebble in the stone garden. He did not look up as Eliza hurried past.

A light spring rain had fallen earlier in the morning, but it had stopped and now a chilly west wind ruffled the mane of Kinugasa-yama. She hurried through the park, afraid to take even a minute to enjoy its beauty. Kimura had promised to meet her at eleven-thirty, and it was now twenty-five after. She was keyed-up, for the first time since her plane had landed at Honeda Airport a week before.

She had been on the scent for seven weeks now. Her time was running out. She had called, written or travelled halfway around the world in these past seven weeks, had tracked O’Hara to the Caribbean, to Mexico, as far south as Buenaventura, Colombia, and east to Recife, Brazil. He had doubled back to Maracaibo, then returned to the States. She had followed a cold trail west to Seattle, from there to Vancouver and then back south again to San Francisco.

His trail was thin, devious and maddening. He had changed names half a dozen times; in South America it had been Solenza; in Canada, Carnet; on the West Coast, Barret. She had used the Howe empire’s contacts with the customs bureau, the passport office and half a dozen major airlines. Twice she had lost the scent, only to pick it up elsewhere. She tracked down old friends, newspaper buddies, retired intelligence agents, even an old girl friend or two.

It was like talking about a ghost. His friends were mutely loyal. His enemies seemed to have given up the trail. But Gunn could be ferocious in her persistence. It had paid off with bits and pieces of information. As the trail lengthened, crisscrossed, disappeared and reappeared, her dossier on him grew fatter. And yet, after seven weeks, she felt she knew little more than what was on paper.

Basics. Period.

She had memorized every line, waiting for some incidental bit of information that might intersect what she already knew and provide a valuable clue.

Francis Xavier O’Hara: Born San Diego, 21 December 1944. Father: vice admiral in US Navy who had two destroyers blown out from under him by kamikaze at Okinawa. Stationed briefly at San Diego in early 1944. Mother: Ph.D. in languages and history, Cambridge. Died when O’Hara was fourteen. Father commanding officer, US Naval Station, Osaka, Japan, for five years until retirement; remained in Japan after retiring until his death in 1968. O’Hara graduate of American high school, Osaka, 1963; University of Tokyo (majors: languages and history), 1967; graduate degree, Oriental philosophy, 1968. Trained in kendo, tai chi, karate and Shinto discipline. Hobbies: scuba diving, karate, kendo, chess, cross-sticks, and dogs, particularly akitas, probably because they are native to Japan. Nickname: called Kazuo, by Japanese friends. Enlisted US Navy as ensign, 1968; assigned naval intelligence and reassigned to the CIA, 1970; specialty:

counterespionage, also involved in covert actions. Resigned 1975. Free-lance writer specializing in investigative reporting, 1976 until 1978. Went underground soon after publishing series for the Washington Post on CIA illegal covert operations in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.

There were some personal references—from teachers, former shipmates, fellow agents, friends, two women he had lived with briefly at different times. There was also hat size, 7; shoe size, 10; weight, 162; height, 5’l0”; hair, sandy; eyes, green. No scars. The usual things that pop up in a computer analysis.

Basics.

Yet the more she learned, the more determined she was to find him.

Then the break came. It was the dog that did it.

She had interviewed some old friends of O’Hara’s in San Francisco, Don Smith, a managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, and his wife, Rose, who ‘was with the ballet company. They were cordial, but had not seen or heard from O’Hara in a couple of years. They were much more excited about their new puppy. A gift from a friend. It was an akita.

Her instincts hummed. She checked the American Kennel Club. She was interested in acquiring an akita. Could they tell her the breeder of the Smiths’ dog?

Yes, but it would take a few days.

Then she got word from the kennel club. The dog had been bred in Kyoto. The sire’s name was Kazuo. The name plucked a nerve. She went back to her notes. Kazuo was O’Hara’s Japanese nickname. The owner of the dog was listed as Akira Kimura. Kyoto was almost a suburb of Osaka, where O’Hara had spent most of his youth.

She had catnapped her way across the Pacific, trying desperately to scan a Fodor’s guide to Japan and an English - Japanese dictionary. She had been tired when she left San Francisco and by the time she landed in ‘Tokyo, ten hours later, she was exhausted; wracked with jet tag, sick of bad food, weary from lack of sleep and piqued with frustration.

What the hell was she doing there? In a strange land she knew nothing about, staying in a ryokan, a traditional Japanese hotel, rather than a big American spread. Thousands of miles from home. Alone. And chasing a ghost.

Terrific, Gunn, way to go. Little wonder O’Hara had eluded a dozen or more money-hungry assassins. He was as elusive as a dream. A bad dream at that.

If O’Hara was alive, and at this point she really wasn’t too sure about that, he had to be here. She felt it. It was the only place left in the world where he might find sanctuary.

She made the first of nine phone calls to Kimura on a Tuesday. Kimura was a Japanese professor who had taught philosophy and martial arts at the American School. It took several phone calls to learn that he was now a Shinto master and that he lived in Kyoto. There was a phone number where she could leave a message. But, she was told, Kimura-san was strange, sometimes he did not return phone calls.

When he finally called back on Thursday morning, she said, ‘I am interested in acquiring an akita. Some friends have a puppy they got from you. The Smiths in San Francisco?’

He was abrupt. ‘I have no friends in San Francisco. It is a mistake.’

‘They got the dog from you, according to the kennel club.’ There was a long pause, and then: ‘Miss Gunn, you are not interested in a dog.’

She was flustered by his honesty. Then she decided to be honest too. ‘Please — dozo —1 am a journalist with an American television station. I am trying to find Frank O’Hara. We are peers, O’Hara and I.’

‘O’Hara-san has many peers, but his friends are fewer than the months of the year,’ the voice on the other end of the line said. It was a soft voice, almost a whisper—his English perfect, his diction impeccable — and yet she felt intimidated by it.

‘I have good news for him. Please see me, talk to me?’

‘I have heard the same story before - There is one difference, however. You are a woman. They have never sent a woman before.’

‘Please, just talk to me. If you don’t believe me, you’ve only lost an hour or so of your time.’

‘I have not said I even know his whereabouts. I was one of his teachers in high school. That was...’ He hesitated a moment, trying to remember.

‘... seventeen years ago,’ she said. ‘He graduated the summer of 1963.’

‘Hal. And I am over seventy. I doubt that I can be of help.’

‘Dozo, Kimura-san. I am desperate. Just have tea with me. I will convince you I’m sincere.’

‘You have a denwa in your room?’

‘Hai.’

‘And the number?’

‘Uh ... it’s 82-12-571.’

‘I will call you back. Konnichi Wa.’ The line went dead.

‘Well, damn,’ she said and hung up. She went to the window and slid the panel back and watched a young gardener, his hair tressed in a tenugui headband, raking the sand garden outside her room, picking up every leaf and twig until the beige island surrounded by moss was spotless. He worked soundlessly and seemingly without effort. She stared back at the phone. Her shoulders ached and she felt like going down to the ofuro to take a bath, but she was afraid she would miss his call. Eliza had overcome her modesty in the public bath very early in the trip. Now she found that the hot waters not only were rejuvenating but cleared her mind and helped her think.

A half-hour passed, and nothing. She fluffed up the futon quilt and lay down, but her mind was much too busy for napping.

When the phone finally did ring, she snatched it up before the second bell. ‘Yes... this is Eliza Gunn.’

‘Miss Gunn, this is Dr Kimura. I will meet you but the time will be short. And it must be today. Can you leave now?’

‘Yes. Right this minute.’

‘The train station is ten minutes west of the Hishitomi Ryokan. You may take the local train from the ekion the San’in Main Line and get off at the Hanazano station. From there it is only a few blocks to the Tofuku-ji temple. I will meet you at the hail of the Ashikaga shoguns next to the temple. It is now nine forty-five. Eleven-thirty should give you ample time.’

‘Thank you,’ she said sincerely. ‘Arigato ... arigato very much.’

‘You have nothing to thank me for yet, Gunn-san. Sayonara.’

‘Sayonara, Dr Kimura.’

The gardener, who had worked his way to the shrubs outside Eliza’s room, turned abruptly and left the courtyard. He went down the hail and knocked on a door. A big man with a beard opened it. ‘What’s happening, Sammi?’ he asked.

The gardener went in. ‘She’s leaving now,’ Sammi said, changing into his black jogging suit and sneakers.

‘Good,’ the big man said. ‘I’ll give her a few more minutes.’ Sammi worked quickly but he was not worried about losing her. He knew where she was going. When she left the hotel he was in a pachinko parlour nearby. He watched her go by and waited several more minutes before leaving. He was more interested in the man who was following her.

II

During the twenty-minute ride from Osaka, Eliza leafed idly through one of her travel books, but she had the attention span of an amoeba. Was Kimura leading her on? Or was she coming close to the end of almost two months of hard work? The Japanese countryside flashed by, a dizzying patchwork of lush green farms separated by mini-forests. She knew very little about Kyoto, except that it had been the capital of Japan during the rule of the shoguns, which lasted for a thousand years, and that many Westerners believed it to be the most beautiful city in the world. But she paid little attention to its beauty as she rushed through the giant arched torii at the park entrance. She could see Tofuku-ji, rising above the other pagodas, and she ran toward it. Statues of shogun warriors crouched in the shadows of the curved eaves of the temples and lurked under cedar and pine trees. The grounds and stone gardens were immaculately manicured and every building, every tree and pond and garden, seemed perfectly placed and in tune with nature. The rain clouds had passed, now, and soft sunlight bathed the heart of the park.

When she reached the garden of the Tofuku-ji, the grounds were deserted and quiet. A breeze rattled gently through the cedar and fir trees. Somewhere, from inside one of the buildings, she heard the soft ping of wind bells. A fish jumped in one of the ponds. Then it was silent again.

The hail of the shoguns was a small, dark, forbidding hail near the main temple, a startling and strange place, out of context with the peaceful aura of the rest of the park. It was as if they were there to guard the integrity of the place, two long rows of wooden statues, the Ashikaga shoguns, sixteen of them, seated facing one another, their fierce glass eyes aglow in the dim light. She walked timidly into the place, squinting her eyes to get accustomed to the dark, peering nervously from one row to the other as she walked down the highly polished wooden floor, her heels clacking hollowly until she finally rose on her tiptoes and hurried to the other end of the room. She was relieved when she got outside. She stood under the curved pagoda roofs of the Tofuku-ji, wondering whether it would be sacrilegious to smoke.

Behind her, inside the darkened hallway of warriors, there was movement. A man stepped from behind one of the statues, his mean eyes glowing almost as fiercely as the agates in the faces of the statues. He moved closer, then stopped finally and waited, as still as the statutes that protected him. A man was approaching her from the other side of the stone garden. He stepped farther back into the shadows.

He was an ancient Japanese man, erect and proud, his delicate beard and wispy hair the colour of snow, his skin almost transparent with age, as if cellophane had been wrapped around his fragile bones to keep them together. He wore a traditional kimono of dark-blue silk, zori sandals, a wide, flat thatched hat that looked like a platter, and he was carrying an umbrella, which he used as a cane. He came to her silently, as if his footsteps left no mark behind them. He stopped in front of her. He was taller than she had imagined he would be and he stood for a moment looking down at her.

‘Well, Gunn-san, you do not appear very dangerous.’

‘Me? Dangerous?’ She laughed. ‘I just ran through that museum of statues over there like a four-year-old running in the dark.’

She knew Japanese businessmen were sticklers about exchanging business cards and she offered him hers. Kimura looked at it for a moment and put it away in the folds of his kimono. ‘I am sorry, I do not have a card,’ he said. He gazed down at her through fading brown eyes, and added, ‘You are certainly prettier than the others who have come looking for Kazuo.’

‘Believe me, I am Eliza Gunn and I work for WCGH in Boston and I have come because I am a friend of O’Hara’s.’

‘Ah? And how long have you known O’Hara-san?’

She chewed the corner of her lip. ‘Well, I really don’t know

O’Hara. Personally, I mean. I know a lot about him, though.

I have a message for him, a letter from Charles Gordon Howe.

He is one of the most respected men in journalism.’

‘I know of Howe. It is rumoured he is honest.’

‘Thanks for that, anyway.’

‘It proves nothing.’

‘If he will just meet me, I can tell him whom to call to verify the letter.’

‘I have not said I know the whereabouts of O’Hara, your friend.’

‘Okay, so I exaggerated. But if you did know how to get in touch with him, you could tell him it’s important to see me, right?’

They walked along the bank of one of the many ponds in the park. The chill wind blew across the water, forming mist that swirled among the mossy rocks at its edge.

‘Even if I knew where O’Hara-san was, I would use caution in repeating anything to him,’ Kimura said. ‘When a blind man leads a blind man, they are both in danger of falling in the river.’

‘Supposing I told you the sanction has been lifted. That he’s no longer in danger.’

The old man made no sign of surprise. He said, ‘In the Shinto philosophy there is a saying: “The man who faces a chasm in front and behind must sit and wait.” To take a false step in a time of danger is to invite disaster.’

‘But I’m telling you, the danger is gone.’

‘It will take much proof. The one they call Fuyu-san, the Winter Man, has the heart of a weasel and the tongue of a crow. I would trust a cobra first.’

‘But that’s the point. The Winter Man has been neutralized. He’s impotent now. It’s Mr Howe who is making the assurance.’

‘An improvement.’

‘So I have to convince you first, is that it?’

‘Since I am to be the parrot, you must first teach the parrot to talk.’

Eliza stopped and stared up at the old man for several seconds. ‘I think I got that one,’ she said. ‘But I’m not real sure. I’ll tell you the truth, I’m having a little trouble with your epigrams. Can’t you just say what you mean straight out?’

Kimura laughed arid then nodded. ‘My own grandson once asked me the same question. The difficulty lies in trying to interpret the symbolism of our words into the definitiveness of yours. Is “definitiveness” a good word?’

‘Sounds okay to me,’ she said. ‘I’m still not sure I get the point.’

Kimura stopped. His eyes were warmer, but still wary. ‘The wise man speaks his truth in symbols. It is your choice to interpret what he says.’ He looked back at her. ‘What is truth to me is not necessarily truth to you.’

The sun slipped behind a cloud and the wind grew colder. She rubbed her hands together and shook a chill off her shoulders.

‘Are you cold?’ he asked her.

‘A little.’

‘Come. The Shokin-tei is nearby. Many believe it is the loveliest tearoom in Japan.’

He led her away from the main temple, across the manicured lawns and over a short footbridge to a one-story building with a thatched roof and vermilion walls. Inside, the place was spotless, its lacquered floors covered with tatamis. They left their shoes at the door and sat cross-legged on zabuton cushions beside a low table. The room was a model of stark beauty. Its sliding glass doors were open and facing the park, and the only decoration was a tokonama just big enough for a scroll painting and a bowl of flowers. The room was cool but comfortable. A waitress appeared and took their order. There was no one else in the teahouse.

‘So, you know a lot about O’Hara, eh?’ he said.

‘I’ve studied nothing else for almost two months,’ she said, and recited the litany.

‘I do not mean to offend you, Gunn-san, but you do not know O’Hara, you know about O’Hara. To catch a wolf, you must understand a wolf.’

‘There you go again.’

The waitress padded back with their tea and left as silently. Eliza waited until she was gone before continuing the conversation. ‘His friends won’t talk about him and his enemies don’t know anything to talk about,’ she said.

‘That is good to know.’

‘Then how can I learn anything about him?’

‘You know he came here as a youth. You do not know that he was very difficult at first, What we call chiisai. It would mean in America “small knives.” One who is of the street gangs. The first year was very difficult. But I was persistent and we became friends and after that, Kazuo was like an empty bucket waiting to be filled.’

‘And you filled the bucket.’

‘I merely provided the water. He filled the bucket.’

‘You were his teacher.’

‘One of them. I showed him the way. He learned very quickly. He became a master of tai chi and then went on to higaru, which is a very difficult form of mental discipline and protective movement. I have seen him stand in the position of the bird, on one leg, for six hours without moving or blinking an eye. He reached the ultimate degree of higaru, which is known as higaru-dashi. It is difficult to translate precisely. I think you would call it . . . the Dance of the Vipers. And I have seen him achieve the no-mind state in a few seconds by simply listening to the sound of the wind.’

‘The no-mind state?’

‘It is a Zen exercise, a form of meditation that cleanses the mind and frees one of all thought. It is achieved by concentrating on a distinct sound. A bell, perhaps, or a self-spoken mantra. For some, the process can take hours. O’Hara-san can achieve no-mind in seconds by concentrating on any sound, even the fiddling of a cricket. When he achieves that being, he can memorize entire pages of a book by simply staring at them. They become paintings in his mind.’

‘We call it a photographic memory.’

‘Excuse me ... dozo... a photographic memory is a gift of birth. The no-mind must be learned. O’Hara does not merely learn, he becomes a master. And still the bucket is not full.’

‘He sounds like some kind of mystic.’

‘He is simply a man of honour who has learned that the wise man seeks everything within himself. The ignorant man takes everything from others.’

‘I call that instinct.’

Kimura thought about that for a few moments and said, finally, ‘An oversimplification.’

‘This is very frustrating,’ she said. ‘After all this time, too. What I bring is good news.’

‘Or the cleverest trap of all.’

‘Believe me, I’m not very clever, and a trapper I definitely am not.’

‘Let me explain it another way. You see that stone garden over there. It was designed by Buddhists over four hundred years ago. Everything in it has meaning, the way the stones are arranged, the way they are raked, the placement of the big rocks, what we call stone boats. Only a small part of them is showing, the rest is below the ground, so we can only imagine what is there. I want to believe what I see and hear, but I must not ignore what is imagined.’

Eliza’s shoulders sagged. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘suppose I show you the documents. That should prove he’s a free man.’

‘But you say these papers are only for the eyes of Kazuo.’

‘I came to deliver a message to O’Hara,’ she said. ‘If I must show you the letters first, then that’s what I’ll do.’

‘That would appear logical.’

He sipped his tea and delicately placed the cup back on the saucer. ‘This must be a very powerful man, this one with the message for O’Hara.’

‘That he is.’

He finished his tea and dabbed his lips, and, very abruptly, he stood up. ‘You will be at your ryokan later today?’

‘Yes, yes!’

‘I must think about this, Gunn-san. You have a quality I admire. You are naïve. It will help in the thinking. Sayonara.’ He bowed and turned and left the tearoom.

‘Well, what am I supposed to do,’ she called after him, ‘just sit and wait?’

He waved his umbrella at her without turning. ‘A disease can be cured,’ he called out. ‘Fate is incurable.’

‘Oh hell,’ she said, ‘just what’s that one supposed to mean?’

But he was gone.

The day had turned warm and pleasant and, with the Kimura ordeal behind her, she strolled back to the eki, stopping along the way for a snack, ordering a bowl of soba, a kind of buckwheat noodle popular all over Japan, managing her chopsticks like an expert. Now, as she opened the door to her room, she felt for the first time that maybe, just maybe, she would find the elusive O’Hara.

She knew something was wrong before she went in, so she entered the room cautiously. It was as if someone were there with her. But she could see the entire room from the door. The closet doors were open, as was the door to the lavatory.

She checked outside. A gardener was weeding the lawn in the rectangle formed by the one-story inn. ‘ Shitsurei shimasu,’ she said.

He looked up and smiled. He was young, and very good-looking, a strange combination of the East and West, with his tenugui headband and his Adidas sneakers. She got her Berlitz translation book, and very carefully pronouncing each word, asked him if he spoke English: ‘Eigo o hanashimasu ka?’

He shook his head.

‘Aw, forget it,’ she said and went back inside.

She decided it was a delayed reaction to all the excitement.

Just a little paranoia, and why not. It had been one crazy day.

She needed to go down to the ofuro and relax in a hot bath.

Then she saw the suitcase lying on the bed.

It wasn’t there when you left, Gunn, old girl.

The maid, perhaps?

Then why is it open?

She went over and lifted the top very gingerly. The O’Hara file lay on top, very neat, but not where she had left it. And on top of it, a slip of paper. The message said:

Give to the taxi man, he will take you to the proper place.

Leave at 7:30. It will take 30 minutes. Go to the pier at the rear of the ground floor. Red Dragon Fireworks. 8 p.m.

The address was spelled out in calligraphy.

Swell.

III

Kimura walked slowly through the park, past the topaz gardens and the Zen pools, which were marvelously lush and green, even this early in the spring, and headed toward the city. A priest from the Tenryu-ji temple on Mount Hiei scurried by, taking the path down through a stand of tall Japanese cypress trees, setting off on a lonely vigil, the Walk of a Thousand Days, one which the Zen Buddhists believe would grant him special powers. A thousand days of austerities which the Buddhists believed would reveal to them the secret powers of Zen.

Kimura remembered his vigils well. Three times he had done the Walk of a Thousand Days, and even now he could remember those lonely times vividly. The last was just after his wife had died. He was fifty-five at the time and had walked almost a thousand miles in the three years he was gone, begging at doorways for his meals, as is the Custom. The mystical journey had eased the hurt of her death.

He remembered her constantly, and the things he loved most in the world still reminded him of her: their grandchildren; the great temple of Kinkaku-ji, where they had met, and which had since been burned to the ground by a mad Buddhist monk; the giant weeping cherry tree in Maruyama Park under which he had asked her to be his wife; and the gold-and-silver Lotus Sutra scroll, which contains the fundamental text of the Tendai, the definitive teachings of Buddha, and where he had spent three days in meditation before becoming a Master of the higaru-dashi.

This park was full of sweet memories, and as he walked through the giant torii and left it, he dedicated his happy thoughts to the gods.

He walked past the sprawling International Hotel and the American Culture Centre to the Gion district, two miles away. This was the old world, the world he loved. The alleys were narrow and spotlessly clean and bordered by high bamboo fences, the shops were true to the architecture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Here, among the people he knew best in the world, the Kyoto dialect had not yet been bastardized, and there was harmony in the symmetry of the houses and among the people who lived in them.

He did not go straight home. He turned instead and walked down a bamboo-walled alley to a house that sat back from the rest of the homes on the street. It was a handsome structure, two hundred years old and perfectly preserved, its handmade latticework oiled and shiny.

The owner of the house was known as Mama Momo, Mother Peach, because her complexion was still smooth, unwrinkled and unblemished despite the storms of sixty-odd years. Kimura had known Mama Momo since the year after his wife died; she was an old friend, and an understanding one. He came to the house twice a week, and each time he brought her 5,112 yen, which is $22.54, in a rice paper bag that was hand-painted by an artist in one of his kendo classes. And each time she would wait until he went to the back before she opened the bag and counted the money.

He walked down the hail to the rear of the house and entered a room which was decorated with chrysanthemums, and with sprig of plum and cherry blossoms. The house was built in a rectangle with its rooms facing a stone garden in the courtyard. Kimura sat on a tatami, stared at the single stone boat near its centre and waited.

How much of Eliza’s story was true,, he wondered, and how much was hidden from view? Was she what she seemed? Kimura’s instincts told him to trust her,, but looking at the stone boat, he was forced to consider the posibi1ity that she, too, had come to kill 0’ Hara.

His thoughts were interrupted by a young girl, no more than twenty, who entered the room with a tray of oils and knelt beside him. She bowed and then smiled at him and ran her fingertips down his cellophane cheeks.. Kimura took her other hand in both of his and smiled back.

‘Ah,’ he said, in the dialect of Kyoto, ‘Miei, my favourite.’

She giggled and answered in the same dialect, ‘We are all your favourites, Tokenrui-san.’ She knelt behind him and slipped off her kimono. Her voice was a bird’s, soft and melodic, and she began to caress his chest and shoulders.

There was a knock on the door. Kimura sighed and leaned back on his arms. The girl put the kimono back on.

‘Who is it?’ he asked,

‘It’s me.’

‘Dozo.’

A big man slid the panelled door open, left his shoes beside the door and entered the room. He was a shade over six feet tall, Caucasian, with a great shock of black hair, a full beard and slate-gray eyes. He bowed to Tokenrui-sari and sat cross-legged in front of him. Miei slipped behind the old man and began massaging his shoulders.

The big man, too, spoke in the dialect of old Kyoto. ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ he said,

‘I have plenty of time.’

‘You met the girl?’

‘Yes.’

‘And?’

‘I found her refreshingly exuberant arid naïve for a Westerner.’

‘In what way?’

‘A certain desperation to get the message to you. But death was not in the desperation. There was.. . innocence? I played some games with her. Reciting abstractions as if they were written in the Tendai. By now she probably thinks everyone in Japan over fifty speaks like a bad American movie.’

‘But you trust her?’

‘Ah, an interesting question. Let us say I am willing to convey her message to you. I am not sure I am willing to advise you to listen.’

‘I read the correspondence in her room. There are two letters. One from the Winter Man lifting the sanction. The other from Howe, verifying its validity. There is also a document from a man named Falmouth in which he swears under oath that the Winter Man offered him twenty thousand dollars to carry it out.’

‘So, it would seem her story is true.’

‘There’s a catch,’ O’Hara said.

‘Ah?’

‘She’s got a shadow.’

‘Anybody known to us?’

‘No. In fact, judging from his manner, I would say he is not even of the Game. He acts more like an American gangster.’

‘What else?’

‘He is large, with bullet head and little pig ears. They are so small, they’re almost a deformity.’

‘And this man, Little Ears, he followed her?’ Kimura asked.

‘He watched your meeting from the hail of the Ashikaga shoguns. Sammi stayed with him the entire time.’

‘Hmm. If it is a trap, does it not seem likely she would have told him where she was going so he could go ahead?’

‘Yes,’ O’Hara said. ‘Unless they are even more clever than we imagine.’

Kimura looked back at the stone boat in the garden for a few moments and nodded. ‘That is an option,’ he agreed. ‘Have you arranged to meet her later?’

‘Yes, at the old place in Amagasaki.’

‘And you will be there ahead of them?’

‘Right. Unless she gives him the address first.’

‘You will know if they are partners. She will tell him where the meeting place is and he will go ahead. If he stays behind her, get between them and force him to make a desperate move. If he does, you will know.’

‘One other thing. I have checked oat her papers. She is what she says she is.’

‘By tonight you will know. This is the first time I have had any feeling about those who have been sent here. I like the young woman. I hope she is what she appears.’

‘Either Sammi or I will call you after it’s over.’

‘I will be waiting.’

The big man got up and went to the door. He looked back at Kimura and Miei and chuckled. ‘You certainly have a way with the young ladies. What’s your secret?’

‘I tell them if they make love to an old man, the gods will add many years to their life.’

‘And...’

‘And they believe me.’

IV

They drove south on the Kobe highway, around the sweeping curve of the bay until, looking back over her shoulder, on what was an uncommonly clear night, she could see the lights of the big industrial plants and shipyards of Osaka harbor.

The trip along the waterfront into a rowdy little village between Osaka and Kobe, its streets teeming with sailors and workers in hardhats, took less than half an hour. They were in what appeared to be the red4ight district. The driver, an elderly man who muttered a lot to himself, guided the Honda through the heavy pedestrian traffic, entered a narrow, winding Street, ablaze with neon calligraphy, pachinko parlours and strip joints, and then turned into an even narrower alley.

The driver stopped in front of a tattoo parlour, twenty or so feet from the main street. He turned to her. ‘Missu sure about numba?’ he asked. ‘Thisu no prace you go.’ He checked the piece of paper and shook his head. ‘Thisee bad place all over.’

‘How much?’ she asked. ‘Ikura desu ka?’

He told her the fare and continued shaking his head as she counted it out. ‘No good bah, no good bah,’he repeated several times.’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It’s getting to be the story of my life. I’ve been in every no good bah between here and Rio de Janeiro. Arigato, old buddy.’

‘Wanna me wait?’ he asked.

She brightened. There was a sense of security in knowing somebody in the country was looking out for her.

‘Hai. Domo arigato,’ she said. ‘I’ll just check.’ She got out and went into the tattoo parlour. The operator was naked from the waist up. He was a short man with an enormous belly and his head was shaved, except for a tuft at the back, which was tied in a pony tail. The man he was working on was covered with tattoos. Hardly an inch of skin on his torso and arms had escaped the needle.

‘Uh, anybody speak English?’ Eliza asked timidly.

The tattooist stared at her without expression, grunted and went back to work. The needle hummed and the customer jumped as it touched his back.

‘Speak Engrish a riddle bit,’ the tattooed man said.

‘I’m looking for the Red Dragon Fireworks office,’ she said. ‘It’s supposed to be here, in this building.’

‘Fiewooks?’

‘Fireworks. Firecrackers. You know, boom, boom.’ She made a giant imaginary mushroom with her arms.

‘Ah.’ He nodded and smiled and pointed toward the floor.

‘Downstairs? Uh... shita ni?’ she asked.

He nodded again. ‘Crosed up.’

‘Crosed up?’

He pantomimed closing a door and locking it.

‘Oh, closed up. For the night? Uh. .. nasai?’

The tattooed man shook his head. ‘Alee time.’

‘Forever? For good?’

‘Hai.’

Great, Gunn. Down an alley in the middle of Shit City, Japan, and the store’s closed. Any other bright ideas?

‘Domo arigato,’ she said, with a tiny bow.

‘Do itashimashite,’ he answered.

She went back outside and walked to the doorway beside the tattoo parlour. There was a red sign beside the door with gold letters, but it was in calligraphy. A light gleamed feebly inside. She tried the door. It was open. She cracked it a few inches and stuck her face up to the opening.

‘Hello? Whoever you are? Are you there?’

She pushed it open a little more and went in. There was a small anteroom followed by a flight of stairs. Nobody had used this building for a very long time; refuse littered the anteroom and the steps. She walked to the head of the steps and yelled down: ‘Hello! Anybody there?’

Still nothing. Another weak lamp glimmered on the end of a cord hanging from the ceiling at the foot of the staircase.

Well, the note said to go down to the pier on the first floor. Let’s do it, Gunn.

She started down the stairs.

Across the street, the man with the little ears stepped from a doorway. He had watched her get out and enter the tattoo shop. Now the cab driver was watching the building she had entered. He would be a nuisance. Little Ears strolled across the alley and approached the taxi from the driver’s rear. As he got to the window, the driver turned and looked up at him. Little Ears struck him with his right hand, a short, straight blow with the fingertips, just below the ear. The cab driver’s head jerked against the headrest, and his mouth fell open. A moment later, he crumpled in the seat.

Little Ears approached the building cautiously. The window in the front door was haloed with dust. He made a small circle with his hand and looked in. The Gunn woman was at the foot of the steps. She turned into a hallway and went out of view. Little Ears quietly entered the building.

The place was scary. Eliza found herself in a long grim narrow hallway. At the far end she could see a door hanging awkwardly from its hinges, and beyond it, the bay. A foghorn bleated far off in the darkness someplace and was answered by another, from even farther away.

She walked about halfway down the hail and stopped. There were sounds all around her: water slapping at pilings; the creaking of old wood; and somewhere in front of her in the darkness, a rat, squealing and skittering across the floor. Squinting down into the darkness, she said to herself, You’re not walking down there, Gunn. There is no way you are going one step farther.

‘Hello?’

Nothing.

I’m not going another inch. I don’t think this is funny at

A door opened at the far end of the corridor and yellow light flickered on the floor. She walked a little closer. The sounds surrounded her now. The stairs behind her, creaking with age; the dock, groaning with the tide.

She was nearly at the doorway when a hand grabbed her from behind. It squeezed her mouth shut. She felt cold metal against her throat. She tried to scream, but it was impossible. Breath, foul with garlic, was hot against her cheek.

‘Easy, lady,’ a voice said in her ear. ‘We’re gonna do us a little fishing.’

She jerked her head up sharply and the hand slipped away from her mouth and she bit it. Hard. And kept biting until she tasted blood in her mouth. The man screamed and she whirled away from him. Another grabbed her in the darkness and spun her into the room. She was caught in a kaleidoscope of movement, images and voices: a new voice in her ear saying, ‘Don’t worry, you are okay’; a table in the middle of the room with a candle, set in a pool of its own wax, burning at one corner; another man standing between her and the candlelight; a towering, frightening silhouette in a thick fur jacket; black shaggy hair; a black full beard. And those eyes, peering from the dark, shapeless face; cold gray eyes looking right through her; the big man charging past her, swinging through the doorway in a crouch.

Little Ears was backed against the wall, his bleeding hand in his mouth, his face bunched up with anger. He hadn’t expected the big man. As he turned, the big man’s foot swept in a wide arc and shattered Little Ears’ wrist bone. The gun, a police special, spun out of his hand, flew across the hallway and stuck in the plaster wall, muzzle first, its stock and chamber protruding out into the hail.

Little Ears swung his hands up in a classic karate position and leaped toward the pistol, but before he could complete the move, his attacker twisted sideways and lashed out with his left leg. He missed, but the move distracted Little Ears and the big man whirled and caught him deep in the gut with the heel of his other foot. Breath whooshed out of Little Ears like air from a punctured balloon. His face turned red with pain and he jack-knifed forward, clutching his stomach. The big man twisted him around with one hand and slammed him in the middle of the back with the palm of the other.

Little Ears flew across the hallway, almost tiptoeing, trying vainly to regain his footing. His arm smashed through the cracked pane of the door, hanging at the entrance to the dock, was caught there for a moment and then the door tore loose and he sprawled headlong onto the dock in a shower of broken glass and curse words. The old dock creaked under his weight. He rolled fast, got his feet under him and jumped into a crouch, but the big man in the fur jacket was all over him. He grabbed Little Ear’s wrist, twisted hard, stepped in close and flipped him in a tight loop.

Little Ears kept moving, rolling out of the loop, trying to get back into the hallway. He snapped his wrist and a switchblade slid from his sleeve into his hand. The blade hissed from the handle, glittering in reflected light. Before Little Ears could turn, the big man leaped into the doorway and slashed his elbow into Little Ears’ jaw. The blow knocked him back onto the dock. He hit the antiquated dock railing, which cracked under his weight. He staggered away from it and took a hard swipe with the knife. Its blade swished an inch from the big man’s face. The big man stepped in fast, getting inside his reach, but Little Ears slashed back and the knife sliced through the big man’s jacket and ripped into his shoulder.

The big man did not utter a sound. He feinted with a chop, stepped back as Little Ears made another swipe, then moved in and threw a body block across him, grabbing his wrist and twisting. Little Ears shrieked and fell to his knees. The knife clattered to the floor.

The big man spun him around, wrapped his wounded arm around Little Ears’ neck, ground his fist into his throat and held the point of the knife against his jugular. He pressed a knuckle from his fist into Little Ears’ carotid.

‘Calm down,’ the big man said. ‘It would be real embarrassing to get your throat cut with your own knife.’

Little Ears grunted something and tried to twist away.

The knuckles dug in deeper. Little Ears growled with pain. The big man said, ‘Listen to me, pal, if you’re after O’Hara, you missed the party.’

Little Ears stopped struggling, He moved his head away from the knife. ‘Aaargh ... larder. . . furmilpuf ...‘ he said.

The big man let up the pressure with the knuckle a little. ‘What was that?’ he asked.

‘Somebody’s already pushed him over?’ Little Ears asked in a husky voice.

‘No, the Winter Man called off the sanction. The Game’s over.’

Little Ears snapped ‘Bullshit!’ and tried to pull away. The knuckle dug in harder. In a moment Little Ears began to go limp. The big man loosened up again. Little Ears was not convinced. He glared at the girl. Then he said, ‘That lying Winter Man told me this was my stunt. Exclusive, he said.’

The big man drove the knuckle into the artery again. His shoulder was killing him, but he kept the pressure on, neutralizing Little Ears.

‘If you don’t calm down, you’re going to have a sore throat for the rest of your life,’ the big man said and turned to Eliza. ‘You got the letter from Dobbs?’

Her eyes were as wide as dollar pancakes. She nodded vigorously.

‘Well, get it up before this jackass dies on me.’

She dug in her bag, thrashing around among clinking mirror, lipstick, comb, brush, hairpins, pens, paper, and finally produced the letter. But Little Ears wasn’t interested. He jammed his elbow into the big man’s ribs and twisted, and the big man let him go, kicked him hard in the kneecap and threw a hard punch straight to Little Ears’ temple. The man hit the railing and it shattered. He soared off the dock, head over heels, and hit the water six feet below, spread-eagled.

The big man leaned back against the wall and sighed. ‘I hope you can swim,’ he said, looking down at Little Ears, who was floundering in the frigid black water,

Little Ears struggled to the dock and dragged himself up on it. He collapsed on his hands and knees.

The big man grabbed a fistful of his collar and pulled him up, and dragged him into the room. He held the letter in front of Little Ears’ face. ‘Can you read?’

Little Ears tried to focus his eyes. He was beginning to shiver. He spat water on the floor.

‘Read it!’

Little Ears waited until his eyes could focus, and he read the letter. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he said. He read it again, shaking his head in disbelief.

‘You almost got yourself burned for nothing,’ the big man said. His shoulder was throbbing.

Little Ears rubbed the spot on his neck. It was already beginning to bruise. His voice was a tortured whisper. ‘I don’t believe this,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I fucking don’t believe this. You know what I got in this job? I started following her in San Francisco, for Chrissakes. I must be close to six grand out of pocket. And that don’t count the time. Three, four weeks. I must be out, dammit, close to ten grand.’

‘Send the Winter Man a bill.’

‘I’ll send him a bill, I’ll go back and castrate the son of a bitch.’

‘Good, you’ll need this.’ The big man pressed the release button on the knife and shoved the blade against the wall. It slid back into the handle. He tossed it to Little Ears. ‘At least you got your knife back,’ he said.

‘Jesus, I don’t believe any of this,’ Little Ears said, still shaking his head, and he dragged his wet, shivering body from the room, pulled his .38 out of the wall and limped up the stairs, the gun hanging forgotten in his hand as he went out the door, still rubbing his throat.

The big man turned to Eliza. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you looked pretty good in there, for a midget.’

Eliza’s eyes were still the size of dollar pancakes, and the questions came tumbling as they returned to the street. ‘Are you okay? Who was that? Is he just going to walk away from it like that? Isn’t he mad or something? You almost broke his neck. You threatened to cut his throat. He tried to kill you. What the hell’s going on, anyway? Won’t he come looking for you later?’

‘He’s a head-hunter,’ the big man said. ‘First thing they learn, never let emotion get in the way of business. If he starts feeling instead of thinking, he’ll end face-up smiling at the moon.’

She shuddered, for the full impact of what had just happened had begun to sink in. The man with the Little Ears had tried to kill them.

‘Kazuo?’

The voice came from behind her, a quiet voice, yet forged with authority. Turning, she found herself face to face with a young Japanese man. He was a head shorter than the big man, wide through the shoulders with no waist to speak of. He wore a black turtleneck sweater, black pants, black soft-soled shoes, and his long black hair tumbled over the sweater at his neck. His brown eyes burned with anxiety.

She froze for a moment, until the big man spoke and she realized he was a friend.

‘Are you okay, pal?’ he said to the big man.

‘Bastard took a piece out of my arm. Was there anybody else?’

‘No, he was operating alone,’ the Japanese said. And then he smiled and raised his eyebrows ‘Maybe I should have backed you up. It did not occur to me that he might be a match for you. He did not look that tough.’

‘A match for me! Bullshit. He was a cheap Street fighter. He got lucky. Oh, by the way, Eliza Gunn, this is Sammi. He followed you while I followed the cheap shot with no ears. It’s known as a double-up.’

She had stopped listening. Instead she was concentrating on the big man’s eyes.

‘One of your eyes changed colour,’ she said to the big man.

‘What?’

‘That eye. That green eye on the right. It used to be gray.’

He turned away from her and Sammi peered intently at the big man.

‘The gods have indeed played a trick,’ Sammi said with mock seriousness. ‘They have changed the colour of your right eye.’

‘Let’s get me to Dr Saiwai,’ the big man said. ‘I need a little repair work.’

But Eliza would not be distracted, She started to laugh. She laughed very hard. ‘Contact lenses,’ she said. ‘You were wearing contact lenses. The cowboy boots must add an inch or so to your height. The contact lenses change the colour of your eyes. The beard and everything ... Kazuo ... hell, you’re O’ Hara!’

V

The doctor’s house was on the outskirts of Kyoto, a dim, black one-story outline against the gray silhouette of Mount Hiei, which soared up behind it, less than two miles away. O’Hara and Sammi were gone less than fifteen minutes. When they came out, O’Hara had his hand stuffed in his pocket.

‘No big thing,’ he told her. ‘Twelve stitches, but the cut isn’t very deep. That bastard ruined my jacket.’

‘Tana will fix it. Nobody will even know,’ said Sammi.

‘Who’s Tana?’ Eliza asked.

‘Friend of the family,’ said O’Hara.

They drove back to Osaka, parked the car and walked to the nomiya, the sake bar, across from her hotel. It was a delicate place, dark and quiet, and after leaving their shoes near the door, they found a small booth near the back.

‘1 will call Tokenrui-san and tell him it went well. He’ll be worried,’ Sammi said and left the stall.

‘Is that Mr Kimura’?’ Eliza asked.

O’Hara nodded. He was looking at her hard with his green eyes, then he suddenly smiled for the first time and she began to feel warm. She took off her coat.

‘You got quite a bite there, pal,’ he said.

‘We can thank my dentist in Nebraska for that.’

‘Nebraska, hunh?’

‘Yep. Webster Groves high school, then the University of Missouri, then Boston, via Chicago. That’s the story of my life. Not much to it. Nothing like yours. Does this kind of thing happen often?’

‘Only when ,I get mixed up with television reporters that bite.’

She smiled at him across the table. ‘Cute,’ she said.

She had one hell of a smile. If ever a smile could be called ear-to-ear, it was that one.

‘What does that word mean?’ she asked.

‘What, “cute”?’

‘No, silly. Token ... whatever.’

‘Tokenrui-san?’

‘Right.’

‘Literally, token means “swords.” But in this case it’s interpreted to mean “the Master.”

‘Do you really think of him as your Master?’

‘Not the way you mean. In the aesthetic sense.’

‘You mean like a teacher?’

‘That’s part of it. He is the Master of higaru-dashi, which is kind of a. . . combination advanced karate, Shinto and Zen. It’s difficult to describe in English. The words are misleading. Anyway, Kimura makes the final choice on everyone who enters the seventh level of the higaru-dashi. What’s known as the Plane of the Beyond.’

‘It sounds way beyond me.’

‘Only because you take the words literally. In Japan, nothing is obvious.’

‘He tells me you can stand on one foot for six hours without blinking an eye. Is that what you call the Plane of the Beyond?’

‘No,’ he said and smiled again, ‘it’s what I call painful.’ The waitress appeared. ‘Osake o ippai onegai shimasu,’ O’Hara said, and she nodded and left. ‘I ordered us sake,’ he explained to Eliza, ‘I think we can all use it.’

‘You seem very much at ease here in Japan.’

‘It’s my home.’

‘That mean you’ve given up on the States?’

He made a vague gesture, which he did not bother to explain.

‘And these people helped you just because they’re your friends?’

‘Is there a better reason?’

‘But it was dangerous.’

‘I was in trouble. A year on the dodge is a long time. Besides, the Winter Man tried to dishonour me. That was unspeakable to Kimura. And to Sammi. Here, a person’s honour is sacred. To steal it is like stealing your soul. It’s a despicable act.’

The waitress and Sammi both returned at the same time. They raised their warm cups in a mutual toast and sipped the hot rice liquor.

‘Tell me more about Kimura. . . Tokenrui-san? Does Kimura still teach? I mean, he seems so old. How old is he?’

‘Sammi?’

Sammi said, ‘Nana-ju-ni.’

‘Seventy-two,’ O’Hara said.

‘And he’s still active?’

‘He would never have taken that cut, tonight, you can bet on that. I’ll hear about it, too, all right, letting that dipshit get his blade into me.’

‘You were not prepared. Your head was with the fleas,’ Sammi said. ‘Your first two moves were an inch too wide.’

‘Yeah. I knew that when I felt his knife in my shoulder.’

‘And Kimura is faster than you?’ Eliza asked.

‘It is not the speed, it is the mind,’ Sammi said.

‘Tokenrui-san can catch a hummingbird in flight,’ said O’Hara. ‘The move is so fast, you don’t see it, you just feel the wind, from his arm moving. That wind is called okinshiwa, and it has different meanings to different people. To you, the wind could mean confusion; to me, because I am his friend, it can mean security. To his enemies, it can mean danger.’

‘And then he opens his hand,’ Sammi said, holding his arm out and unfolding his fist, ‘and the bird sits there and waits for him to blow on its tail and make it fly away.’

‘That’s the mystic part of it,’ said O’Hara. ‘When I understand that, I will feel that I have achieved the Plane of the Beyond.’

‘It’s all very difficult...’

‘That’s because it requires a different kind of thinking than you’re accustomed to. Kimura changed my life.. . no, he saved my life. If it weren’t for him, I’d probably be a headhunting punk like Little Ears.’

‘Doesn’t it seem strange,’ she said, ‘just a few years ago we were all at war. Was he involved in that?’

‘Involved?’ Sammi laughed. ‘I suppose you could say that.’

O’Hara said, ‘He hand-picked the officers — and this is the top staff of the Imperial Army we’re talking about — who were to enter the seventh level of higaru-dashi. He only selected twelve. They were with him for three years before they returned to duty — in 1942. Every one of them was a key man in the Japanese war machine.’

She sat quietly for a minute, letting it sink in.

O’Hara said, ‘You might say he prepared them to kick the shit out of us.’

And he and Sammi laughed, and then she laughed too. ‘And you feel the same way about him, right?’ she said to Sammi.

‘It’s not quite the same,’ O’Hara said. ‘Tokenrui-san is Sammi’s grandfather.’

Neat, Eliza. Next time, take your shoe off before you put your foot in your mouth.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘that was dumb, bringing up the war.’

‘It’s no secret,’ Sammi said, and went on talking fast and running his sentences together. ‘Anyway, it’s a natural question but many people wouldn’t ask, he will like it that you were honest enough to find out. There is one other thing. Higaru is never used for aggression, it is used to defend. When my grandfather taught these men, it was because he was led to believe that Japan might be attacked.’

‘He had good feelings about you,’ 0 ‘Hara said, changing the subject. ‘Now, me -- I thought you and that pistolero were working a double. Some kind of elaborate sting.’

‘Well, thanks a lot. I come halfway around the world, get insulted, shoved around, almost killed, just to bring you these letters, and you think I could be — what did you call it, ”working a double”? — really ... with that dumb ass. If you’re in the seventh plane, or whatever you call it, you ought to be able to judge character a little better. Besides, what was all that melodrama back there about, anyway? If all you want is peace and quiet, why didn’t you just walk up to him and tell him it was all off?’

‘Much too logical.’

‘Yeah,’ Sammi said. ‘This way he knows we were serious.’

‘Like hitting a mule with a two-by-four to get its attention.’

‘Also he needs something to show for all those bucks he wasted.’

‘In any case,’ O’Hara said, ‘we had to make sure about you.,

‘You mean I was just bait!’

O’Hara thought about that for a moment or two and nodded. ‘That’s about it,’ he said.

‘We knew you weren’t teamed up after the drive down from Osaka,’ Sammi said. ‘I boxed him in on the highway. He lost you for a minute or two and he panicked.’

‘So...?’

‘So, if you two had been doubled up,’ O’Hara said, ‘you would have told him where we were meeting. And he would have gone in ahead. And he would have set me up.’

‘How do you know?’

‘It’s in the spy manual. Chapter two.’

‘Very clever. Devious but clever.’

I wonder if he really can stand in one spot without moving for six hours. And without blinking those eyes. Those green, green eyes.

He’s talking, Gunn, pay attention.

‘...Shinto way. The universe is ruled by letting things take their course. It cannot be changed by interfering.’

Now, what was that all about.

‘I’m sorry, I missed that,’ she said.

‘It means fate is tough to beat, pal.’

‘Please, don’t call me pal. I knew a dog once named Pal. A real ugly bulldog.’

‘Okay, Gunn. What’s it all about? Who got the Winter Man off my ass? And what does Howe want out of all this?’

‘I don’t know, Mr Howe will have to tell you that.’

He was looking at her across the table. His eyes were even more penetrating, more alive, than with the gray contacts. He stared at her left eye and suddenly a ridiculous memory popped into her head. She tried to ignore it, but it persisted, whispering in her ear, an old wives’ tale from high school.

When a man stares into your left eye, he can see your pussy.

Oh, for God’s sake, really!

When a man stares into your left eye, he— He’s talking to me and I can’t hear a word he’s saying. All I can hear is that stupid voice whispering in my ear. When a man stares...

‘Excuse me,’ she said. ‘My mind ‘wandered. I’m afraid I didn’t hear what you said.’

And O’Hara was thinking, She’s flashing that smile, that big smile. They ought to declare that smile a national resource.

Easy there, big boy, you’ve seen big smiles before.

Yeah, but not like that one ... and not any time in the past year.

‘I said, what do you mean, Mr Howe will explain it,’ he said finally.

Eliza put the letter from Howe in front of O’Hara. ‘I’ve read it already,’ O’Hara said. ‘I read it when I broke into your room this afternoon.’

‘Oh, that’s right. Well, then you know. Mr Howe wants to see you. I don’t know why. I don’t know why he was so determined to find you and get you cut of trouble with this Winter Man. All I know, he wants to talk to you about an assignment. He says nobody else can do it but you. And he’s pressed for time.’

‘Presumptuous son of a bitch.’

‘Hey, I found you. I delivered the message. If you want to tell him to get stuffed, that’s your business. If you decide to go, I have a thousand dollars in cash and a plane ticket to Boston for you. First class.’

‘You’re carrying a thousand dollars in cash?’

‘Not where you can get your hands on it.’

He’s staring again. He’s looking straight into my... no into my left eye.

O’Hara was listening to the wind chimes overhead, tickled by a breeze from the door. His eyes went blank, then his mind went blank, and in the no-mind state where he had retreated, her face was etched into the white wall. The large gleaming brown eyes, the shock of black hair, the broad you’re-dead-buddy smile. Now it was a face he would never forget.

‘...earth to O’Hara,’ she was saying.

‘Yeah...’

‘Are you interested?’

‘Uh ... interested?’

‘In Mr Howe’s offer.’

‘I wish you’d stop calling him Mr Howe. Sounds like you’re talking about God.’

‘He’s old. He’s like Tokenrui-san. He deserves it.’

‘Fine. Then call him Howe-san.’

‘Will you get serious? What’s your decision?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Well, when do you think the muses are going to get in touch?’

‘I’ll tell you in the morning.’

‘Oh.’

‘I need to do some thinking.’

‘I can understand that. Who’d want to go back to the land of the living when you can stay here in the garden spot of Japan and raise puppy dogs.’

O’Hara leaned across the table, very close to her face, and said softly, ‘He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened.’

‘How about “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” Don’t tell me you’re going to start doing that now.’

He liked her arrogance, the way she said whatever the hell was on her mind. But he also felt let down. A part of his life was coming to an end. He knew it. Fate had brought the girl there and fate would lure him back with her.

‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m going to take you across the street to your hotel and then I’m going home and get some rest.’

‘The arm hurts, doesn’t. it?’

‘It’s beginning to burn a little. The pain will be gone by morning.’

‘And you’ll call me?’

‘I’ll call you.’

‘I’ll get the car, Kazuo,’ Sammi said, and he bowed to Eliza. ‘You come back, okay. We’ll teach you the Tao. The Way. Next time.’

They put their shoes on and paid the bill and O’Hara walked her across the Street to her hotel and O’Hara’s shoulder was hurting and he felt rotten, and standing there, he suddenly felt very tired.

‘Oyasuminsai,’ he said and kissed her on the cheek, and started back across the street, and she said, ‘There’s a flight tomorrow afternoon at three,’ and without turning, he said, ‘Well, you better make your reservation. It’s liable to fill up. Sayonara.’

He got in the car and they drove off and left Eliza standing in the doorway of the hotel. A kiss on the cheek, she thought. Well, shit. But she’d get another crack at him. He would come to Boston, she was sure of it. And next time he would not have his shoulder as an excuse.

5

O’Hara said nothing during the drive back to Kyoto from Osaka, nor did Sammi encourage any conversation. He knew Kazuo was deep in thought. The house of Tokenrui-san was on the curve of a street in the old section of Kyoto. It was built in 1782 and had changed very little since then. The cypress bark on its sloping roof had been replaced many times through the years, as had the waist-high bamboo fence encircling it. But the cypress columns around its railed veranda were originals, as were the delicate screens in the main room, one depicting the return of a warrior to his home, and another, by Isono Kado, a famous artist of the seventeenth century, of a hawk perched on a pine-tree branch. The paintings had been rescued from one of the royal houses during the great fire, which had destroyed more than half the temples and homes of Kyoto in 1788.

For years the house was inhabited variously by students, monks and Heian priests, and it fell into disrepair. Then, in 1950, Kimura’s son-in-law, Tasaguyi, had acquired it and restored it as a wedding gift and dowry to Kenaka, Kimura’s only child. But now Tasaguyi and Kenaka were gone, and he lived there with his two grandchildren, Samushi and Tana.

The house was close to the street and was built like a half-moon, its inside curve facing a lush flower garden built around the fish pond which was fed by a stream that gurgled constantly under a corner of the veranda of the main house. The carp and goldfish, some of them more than four feet long, had been there so long, Kimura had forgotten how old they were.

At the far side of the garden, facing the back of the main house, was a workshop that had been built ten years after the main house. It was this small dwelling, with its large main room and small tub room, that had been O’Hara’s home during the two years he trained for his initiation into the shichi, the inner council, of the higaru-dashi, as well as his sanctuary during the long months of his recent exile.

The sweet smell of wisteria seemed to be everywhere as they entered the main gate and walked around the corner of the house toward the garden. And there was always a silence there, as if God had turned off the sounds of the world. He said good night to Sammi, thanked him and went around to the back to his place of peace, a sanctuary where he had retreated to consider his plight and make the decisions which had kept him alive during the long ordeal of the Winter Man.

From a group of trees near the doorway of the house, there were sounds; a twig cracking, a leaf falling, followed by a low, friendly ‘ruff.’

‘Hi, kids,’ O’Hara said to the big male akita dog, Kazuo-dan, and his mate, whom O’Hara had named Konsato, which means ‘concert,’ because when she was a puppy she bayed constantly: at the moon, the stars, the sun, the blossoms and anything else she could raise her head and howl at. The male, a large silver-gray dog, its tail curved up over its hindquarters, stepped out of the shadows to greet him. He was a regal animal, his bloodlines tracing back to a sire that was once guard dog to an emperor, and he carried himself with restrained élan. The female was more frivolous. She hopped about, licking O’Hara’s hands and nibbling Kazuo’s neck, which the male treated with a kind of annoyed tolerance.

He could sense Tana’s presence before he saw or heard her. There was a lacquered vase of white chrysanthemums in the tokonama which faced the door as he entered. She had prepared a snack of makizushi, tiny rolls of vinegared rice wrapped in thin seaweed and stuffed with asparagus tips and fish or seafood, and placed it on a low table near the sliding rosewood doors that led to the garden. His silk nightshirt was laid out beside hers near the futon on his bed.

Once inside, he could hear her singing softly, somewhere in the back of the house.

It was going to be difficult, telling her. He turned into the lavatory which was off a short hallway that led from the door to the main room. He slid the door shut and got out a straight razor and a mug of shaving soap and, after lathering his face, he shaved off his beard. As he shaved, his eyes kept drifting to the mirror and the reflection of the photograph of the Hichitani Chemical plant behind him.

It was a grim, dark, foreboding picture, showing the plant as a gray mass with tall stacks, lurking under an ominous tumour of polluted clouds. In the foreground, the polluted sky was reflected on the shiny ridges of the waves of the bay. The photograph was one of hundreds shot by the American photographer W. Eugene Smith, as part of an essay on the tragedy of Hichitani.

The plant was located on the shores of a nameless bay a few kilometres south of Minamata on southern Kyushu. Hichitani had been, for fifty years, the patron of more than seven hundred workers in this isolated village, and its only industry. There was no private enterprise in the village, except for the fishermen who lived there, and most of their boats were financed by the company. Hichitani provided the townspeople of Minamata with jobs, housing and a company store where they could buy food and clothing. Many of the men and women, whose grandparents had worked in the factory, had never been more than a hundred kilometres from the town where they were born. Its very isolation perpetuated the tragedy. Minamata was the culture for an epidemic of horror than spanned half a century.

The Hichitani corporation produced anodized aluminium — from raw materials to finished product. The effluent from its smelting plant was carried through long pipes and dumped into the ocean on the far side of a peninsula that protected the bay from the open sea. The prevailing tides, however, carried the sea water around the peninsula and back into the bay.

One of the chemicals in the raw effluent was mercury, an almost infinitesimal amount of mercury. But when mixed with water and catalysed by other chemicals in the waste, the mercury produced mercuric oxide, a deadly poison. The years passed and with each day, microscopic pearls of death drifted in with the tide and settled on the plant life and on the floor of the bay. The bay was a fisherman’s paradise, and the fish, the main food source for the village, fed on the plant life and ingested the deadly pearls from the water.

Decades passed. The mercuric oxide slowly infested the bay and its environment. Its effect on the people was gradual, developing over two generations. Then, in 1947, the plant doubled its capacity.

The first big fish kill occurred the following year, a year before the birth of the Matzashi child. Hundreds of tuna, sea bass and mackerel had drifted onto the beach of the bay. It was blamed on the red tide, and the incident was never reported to the press, but a few days after it happened, a group of engineers arrived from the main office in Ube, to study the fish kill. Hichitani later said their findings were inconclusive.

In 1949, the first deformed child was born and the effects of thirty years of pollution began to show. Nobody was too concerned about the Matzashi baby. After all, it was rumoured, the husband and wife were directly related. But two months later a child was born with no eyes, and then another with shrivelled, wasted legs, and another whose head was three times the normal size. Fourteen deformed children were born that year and five employees of the plant died of dysentery.

The scientists returned. Very quietly. On the team that was sent down the second time was Tasaguyi, a brilliant young chemical engineer. He moved to Minamata with Kenaka, his bride of less than a year, and set up an in-depth study of waste handling at the plant. Kenaka taught school. During the next three years, dozens of horribly deformed children were produced among the workers and townspeople who lived along the bay and fished its waters. Several of the older workers went blind, others died of a painful, kind of dysentery that killed or crippled its victims. The place seemed cursed, which indeed it was.

The first of the Tasaguyi children, Sashumi, was born in 1952. He was a normal but frail child Who was constantly ill. Tana, the daughter born the following year was deaf at birth. Ironically, it was Tasaguyi who detected the presence of mercuric oxide in the fish, the water and the plant life of the bay, but it was too late to help his daughter.

He sent the children back to Kyoto to live with their grandfather, and still believing the company would take drastic steps to save the village, and to prevent a panic, he quietly presented his findings to the board of Hichitani. The company announced it would build a new waste-treatment facility at the factory and a new water-treatment plant for the town, but still did not reveal to the people of Minamata the danger that lay at their doorstep. By then, there were hundreds of deformed children in the town, and dysentery was almost endemic.

Tasaguyi resigned, formed a citizens ‘group in the village and announced his findings to the press. A national scandal resulted. But a few months after beginning his crusade, Tasaguyi began suffering telltale cramps and diarrhoea. He kept up the fight. The cramps got worse. He began losing weight. Then he awoke one night desperately ill and died in agony eight hours later. Kenaka was determined to continue his fight, but she, too, was already terminally aff1icted with mercury poisoning. Kimura brought his beloved daughter back to Kyoto, where, for the last two months of her life, she was raving mad. He refused to commit hr to an institution and instead kept her locked in the workhouse, where he tended to her until she died.

The workhouse had been empty from then until O’Hara came to live there for the last two years of his training as a shichi. But the photograph remained on the wall as a perpetual reminder of the horror of Minamata and its devastating effect on this one family.

He finished shaving and went back down the hail toward the main room. O’Hara loved this house. It had been his only real home. It was here he had lived for two years while he trained for the Ritual of the Shichi. He had kept an apartment merely as a base during his years in the service, but he was rarely there. And for the past year he had hidden in this ancient house, communed with its ghosts, reaffirmed his mental and physical commitment to higaru-dashi and his emotional commitment to Kimura, Sammi and, most of all, to Tana.

The main room was startlingly simple, yet strangely warm and inviting. The only electrical device was a lamp over the tatami on which O’Hara slept. There was a low table with a mat beside it, several candle lanterns and a bookshelf. Nothing else.

Except the flowers. Each day Tana decorated the room with flowers. Red and white and purple and pink, every colour one can imagine. It was the flowers that gave the place its warmth and life.

O’Hara walked across the room and popped one of the snacks in his mouth, savouring the shrimp she had mixed with the vinegar rice in the makizushi. He could hear Tana in the small room that contained the great redwood tub, preparing his bath. She was singing softly to herself, a birdlike voice that was always slightly off-key. He changed into the knee-length black silk nightshirt and sat cross-legged on the mat.

Tana dipped her arm into the steaming water until it covered her wrist. It was very hot, but Kazuo liked it very hot. She guessed he had been, gone for perhaps three hours, but there were no clocks in the house and O’Hara did not own a watch. There was a small fear in her stomach, a gnawing anxiety. Something was going to take him away, to draw him back to the ways of the West. She sensed the danger.

When O’Hara first came to live there ,during the preparation for the ritual vows of the shichi, Tana was a child. Shy, withdrawn, wary at first of the fair gaijin, the foreign devil whom her grandfather had seemed to adopt, she was drawn to him gradually by the same strength and mysticism that attracted her grandfather and brother. He was unlike the other shichi candidates she had known. He laughed readily and made jokes on himself. He was gentle and was rarely moved to anger. And, best of all, he learned sign language so they could talk. In the evenings, after the mental and physical strain of the long days of the shichi preparation, he would sit near the fish pond, and with fingers wiggling, he would tell her ghost stories from America.

Samushi, whom O’Hara nicknamed Sammy, changing the y to an i so it would look Japanese, had also resented O’Hara at first. It seemed, to Sammi, an insult that Tokenrui-san, his own grandfather, would assign his grandson to the fair-haired Kazuo for training into the higaru--dashi. But the young novitiate soon learned that it was an act of love, for O’ Hara was not only classically disciplined, he was an excellent teacher. It was O’Hara who discovered that Sammi had remarkable reflexes and who devised a series of moves to best use his speed. It was also O’Hara who devised the gruelling exercises that built up Sammi physically so he could deal with the rigors of higaru-dashi, exercises that were so painful that in the early days of the training, Sammi would often work the last two or three hours of the day with tears streaming down his face.

There was, of course, no quitting. To do so would have been to dishonour not only himself and Tokenrui-san but his sister and O’Hara as well. Besides, O’Hara, himself preparing for the mystical journey into the seventh level, conducted a personal daily ritual which was almost crippling in its demands. Sammi’s resentment faded, to be replaced first by respect, and then by love. By the time O’Hara became a shichi and Sammi was inducted into the higaru-dashi, they were as brothers.

When O’Hara left to fulfil his obligation to his father, it was a painful experience for all of them, but it was agony for Tana. She hurt deep inside, the kind of hurt that could not be cried away or beat away or screamed away. It tormented her, and the ache in her chest and her throat stayed with her. She was only fourteen, yet she knew the depth of her feeling was very different from the feeling of deep friendship, the almost family bond, that had grown between O’Hara and her grandfather and brother.

Tana was in love with O’Hara, yet years passed and she told no one, not even Kimura. So for the next seven years, as she grew into a stunning woman, wise but uncomfortably aloof, she thought about Kazuo every single day. She wanted to forget about him, tried to forget about him, but it was futile. The young men of Kyoto courted her and were rejected. Finally she told Tokenrui-san of her plight.

‘One cannot try to forget, for the trying itself keeps the memory alive,’ Kimura told her.

She went to the temples and asked the gods to rid her of her obsession for Kazuo.

And what did the gods do?

They sent him back to her.

Sometimes it was difficult to understand the message of the Tao. So she accepted their gift without understanding it.

She was twenty-two years old when O’Hara came back. At first he still seemed to think of her as a child. Her aloofness vanished. And one night as he started to tell her about some interesting incident from his days in intelligence, she interrupted him and, with her hands, she said, ‘Tell me a love story instead.’

O’Hara did not need the wisdom of the Tao to figure that one out.

But now the dream was threatened. There was no answer in the Tao. Her fate was no longer in her own hands.

She stood in the doorway to the living room and dried her arm. She still did not see or sense him in the room. O’Hara leaned back on his arms and looked across the candlelit room at her. She was shorter than her brother, and very slender. Her skin was flawless and the colour of sand. Her black hair hung almost to her waist. Her brown eyes seemed misty under hooded lids, as they always were in candlelight. Her breasts poked at the short nightgown that hung by thin straps from her shoulders.

She was delicious.

He watched her for several minutes and then moved so she would see him. His presence there startled her, for she usually sensed him before she saw him.

She looked at his smooth face, at his green eyes.

She spelled out the words with her fingers, moving them in a gentle, constant flow that reminded O’Hara of a dancer’s hands.

‘No beard.’

‘No.’

Her hand swept across her eyes.

‘No eyes.’

‘No.’

‘Then it went well?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now you are safe.’

‘Yes.’

‘Does this make you happy?’

‘Yes. No man should feel like a hunted animal.’

‘Or woman.’

He bowed slightly. ‘Or woman.’

She looked away from his face, down at his feet and there were tears in her eyes. Her hands moved very slowly: ‘Your bath is ready.’

She turned and went back into the tub room. He followed her in and turned her around, facing him.’ Has something changed? Is it not our bath?’

And he kissed her very lightly on the lips, caressing her neck with his fingertips, and moved his hands down her smooth skin and out over her shoulders and slipped the silk gown free and it dropped at her feet and he slipped his arms out of the sleeves of his shirt and quickly pulled it over his head, breaking their kiss for only a second.

He moved closer to her until the tips of her nipples were touching him. And she moved closer, felt him growing hard against her and his hands slipped around her and he very lightly began stroking her back and she began to move her body under his fingers and he got harder and she moved back slightly and began to caress his thighs and his stomach and his memory tumbled back in time to the night she first came to him: dressed in her mother’s red-and-white silk kimono, she had entered his dark room, lit the single candle near his bed, and kneeling beside him, had told him with those wondrously poetic hands that she loved him.

She had closed his eyes with her fingertips and then traced every muscle in his body with a touch like feathers, humming in that gloriously soft and delightfully off-key voice, and then she had retraced his body with her lips until finally she took him in her mouth without touching him with her fingers, and the memory aroused him even more and he began to rub her buttocks, moving her very subtly closer to him and she rose on her toes and he felt her hair crush against him and he bent his knees and let his penis slide against her and she arched her back slightly so her clitoris was against him and for several minutes they stood together, moving slowly to the rhythm of her humming and then he bent his knees a little more and he felt himself enter her and her wet muscles closed around him and she wrapped first one leg, then the other around his waist and he slid his hand down between their stomachs and found the trigger of her senses and felt it harden as he stroked her, and the humming became a sigh and the sigh became a tiny cry in her throat and she stiffened and she stopped breathing for several seconds and then she thrust herself down on him and cried out and she began to shudder and the response of her passion was so overwhelming that all his senses suddenly seemed to rush out of him and he felt a spasm, and then another, and another, another, another, and he exploded, and his knees began to tremble but he held her close and stayed inside her and slowly went up the steps and got in the tub and the hot water swirled around them and she cried out again and this time her response seemed to renew him and he felt himself growing longer again, growing deep inside her and she moved up and down, sliding him against her and she felt herself building again, she felt almost electrified, lost in time and space, and the waves began again, building, building.

When it was over, he tried to tell her that he had to go back, had to leave her. But she closed her eyes, for she knew this time the hurts would be harder and the memories would be realities, and this time perhaps the gods would not send him back to her. So she closed her eyes, and that way he could not talk to her. But she spoke to him, a phrase she had practised many times with Sammi, and although she still was not pleased with the way she said it, it was time.

‘I ruv you, O’Haya,’ she said, and with her eyes still closed, she laid her wet fingertips against his lips.