FIRE AND FOG (29 page)

A Ninja came over to me and, for no reason whatever, boxed my
ears. I heard popping and felt sharp pain. Tears rose again in my
eyes, but these I blinked away. Shock and horror were fading. I was
getting angry instead.

The Ninja who'd hit me bent down so that his masked face was
right in mine. He spoke slowly and distinctly. "Now you tell us:
where are the swords?"

"I don't know what you are talking about. What swords?" As soon
as the words were out of my mouth, I did know:
the
contraband!
And Private Albright, with his all-American good
looks and convincing show of friendship, was mixed up in it
somehow. He had to be-no one else knew exactly where I was.

The other Ninja joined his pal. Now they were both having at me.
"Sacred swords of ancestors. Samurai swords. Stolen. Not part of
bargain. What you do with them?"

"There was only the one," I said, thinking of the exotic curved
blade with the squiggly writing on it, "and it disappeared. The
blue jewel, I suppose it is a sapphire, is all that's left, and you
are welcome to it. I never intended to keep the thing, it's just
that I have been rather busy lately-"

The one who seemed to do all the hitting hit me again. "No lie!"
he yelled furiously.

Keep that up and someone will hear you,
I thought,
getting madder by the minute. Through clenched teeth I said, "I am
not lying."

The two masked heads turned toward each other, nodded, and the
Ninjas moved away from me. They held a quiet conversation in their
own language, while I wondered if they'd ever left ugly gifts on
the steps at Haight Street, ever ransacked the house, murdered
Alice. Then one of them walked over to the table and stood looking
down at my typewriter.

"Don't touch that!" I cried, knowing even as I did that I should
have kept silent.

He cast me a glittering look. The other Ninja seized my lair
with one hand and clamped his other hand over my mouth. The one at
the table said, "This machine means much to you."

I nodded, a motion that pulled my hair painfully. My captor
removed his hand and said, "Samurai swords mean much to us. We know
you lie, know you work with Sollenson. Sollenson gone, dead. You
alive. So now you tell us what you do with swords of
ancestors."

Sollenson?
My mind raced. "Oh, you mean the Sorensons. I
think I know now what swords you are referring to. I did not
actually see them, only the hilts, which, to judge from their size,
must have been the hilts of a very large pair of swords. But I did
not touch them, I swear. I did not work with the Sorensons, either;
I only rented an office in their building. You must believe
me-"

My voice died in my throat as I watched the Ninja, with brute
strength, rip the slender metal ribs from the inside of my
typewriter. He bent them as if they were the softest gold-to me,
they
were
more precious than gold-and threw them by handfuls
onto the floor. He tore off the round, silver-rimmed alphabet keys
and dropped them on the pile. The noise of it was terrible:
metallic death. He came over to me. His buddy jerked my head back
by the hair.
"Now
you tell," he said.

I was devastated, my anger consumed in black despair. Tears fell
unchecked-so much for being brave. "I cannot tell you anything
because I don't know," I said through my tears. "I only saw those
things once, on the day of the earthquake. I went back to the
building after it was burned, and all I found was the sapphire,
which you have. All the other things were gone. I have no idea who
took them, and that's the truth."

"You foolish lady," said the Ninja, turning away. The other let
go my hair, and I thought for a moment they were going to release
me. But the one who was the hitter and hair-puller gagged me
instead. The one who had turned away now turned back, with
something gleaming in his hand.

It was a hypodermic needle. I struggled against my bonds, I
squealed, but I was helpless. He plunged the needle into my neck.
Almost immediately my vision clouded, and I thought: /
am
dying.

I opened my eyes in the blackness of a tomb. I couldn't breathe,
I was suffocating. /
have been buried alive!
I thought in
panic. Immediately I knew that panic was no good, I should try to
assess my situation objectively.

I was lying face down. Not in grave dirt, but rather there was a
cool, dampish surface beneath my cheek. A hard surface. I moved my
head: The surface was splintery, therefore wood. I rolled
completely over onto my back, which proved to me that I was not in
a coffin. My hands were bound behind me so I settled on my side. I
told myself:
Easy, Fremont, easy.

Less panicky now, I could feel bands of fabric on my face. One
over my eyes, one over and partially in my mouth. A blindfold and a
gag. Because of the former, I could not see; because of the latter,
gasping for air through my mouth was like slow suffocation. But I
had not been buried alive, and for the moment that was quite
sufficient.

It is a good thing,
I thought, trying to breathe
normally,
that I do not suffer from nasal congestion.

My head hurt.
Where am I, and how did I get here?

After a few moments I remembered the Ninjas. They .had destroyed
my typewriter! They had destroyed everything I owned! I remembered
being gagged, remembered the needle plunged into my neck, and then
falling into darkness. I had thought I was dying, and so had come
back into consciousness expecting the grave.

Perhaps I
was
dead, and this was some sort of very
disappointing afterlife. A dark hell for people such as myself who
have never had much use for religion.

Nonsense!
My head still hurt, but it was rapidly
clearing. The Ninjas had not meant to kill me, only to drug me so
that I could be moved more easily; they had blindfolded me-why? I
could not think why anyone would blindfold an unconscious woman, so
I fell to wondering where I was.

My hearing is the most acute of my senses, but for the moment it
was telling me nothing. My sense of smell was more informative: I
smelled fish. No, not fish precisely, but fishiness in general. And
something else that took me longer to identify: motor oil. I
sniffed, detecting a hint of salt in the air. I listened again,
harder. What I heard was no particular sound but rather the hush
that is common to large, empty spaces.

So: I was in an empty warehouse or boathouse on the docks. San
Francisco's docks, I hoped; I would be in a fine kettle of fish, to
use an apt Neptunian phrase, if they'd spirited me away to some
unknown port.

My feet were free-also bare and cold but no matter. Probably I
could flee regardless of my hands being tied, if I could only see
where I was going. Aha! That was no doubt why they had blindfolded
me. Clever Ninjas. Well, I should just have to be cleverer still.
They might destroy my typewriter and everything else, but I'd be
damned if I'd let them destroy Fremont Jones!

There was a little-very little-give in the rope that bound my
wrists. I began to work it back and forth, back and forth. Patience
has never been a strong point of mine, but I knew it was called for
now. Yanking at the rope would do no good, whereas steady,
persistent pulling might stretch it enough that I could slip one
hand through.

I have no idea how long I'd been working at it when I heard
voices. I pricked up my ears and thought I recognized the foreign
tongue of the Ninjas, though I could not make out individual words.
In the space between sentences, I heard their quiet tread: they
were walking in my direction.

Panicking, I yanked my wrists apart. Apparently I had chosen the
right moment to do that, because I felt the rope give. But not
enough-I still couldn't get my hand through. I kept on working
away. The Ninjas had stopped moving. I would have given almost
anything to know how far off they were, whether or not they could
see me from where they stood. I thought not. I had an impression
that this warehouse, or whatever, was fairly dark, or else I should
have been able to see some light at the edges of the blindfold. I
raised my head, peering in the way one does to cheat at blindman's
bluff or pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. I could not see anything at
all, for whatever that was worth.

Heavy footsteps joined the Ninjas, who had begun to talk to each
other again. They were near enough now for me to make out their
words, but of course that did me no good, since I did not
understand Japanese.

A man's voice boomed out: "Talk English, will ya? I can't make
heads nor tails of that Jap gibberish!"

I knew that voice! Surely it was Mickey Morelock! I almost cried
out, determined to make as much noise as I could in spite of the
gag-but I stopped myself. I might be mistaken. Then, as I listened,
I knew I was not mistaken . . . yet, in a way, I had been. The
voice was Mickey's, all right, and he had played me for a fool.

A Ninja said, "We have brought the woman, Fremont ones.

For a moment I didn't realize he meant me, because in his
Japanese accent he said Fle-mont. I worked at my bonds.

The Ninja continued, "She no help. She know nothing, she have
nothing. You must deal with her, we do not want more blood on our
hands. Ninja do not come all the way from Japan to kill without
reason."

Mickey said, "If you Japs wasn't so stupid, ya wouldn't have got
the wrong woman in the first place. Besides, nobody told you to
kill that-what's-her-name, Alice."

"We not want to kill her, but she no be silent when told. I slit
throat to stop screaming. Too much blood, very messy, very much
trouble to clean up. Hiding body more trouble."

A different Japanese voice broke in, more facile with English:
"Mr. Morelock, you have not kept good faith with us. First you take
our ancient samurai swords, not part of deal. Then you tell us
there will be no payment because shipment has disappeared. You tell
us Sollensons make it disappear with help of Jones woman. We no
longer believe you.

My wrists were slippery. I knew the slipperiness was from my own
blood, that I had abraded the skin off, but I did not care about
that. Apparently blood is a good lubricator, for suddenly one of my
hands slipped through the rope and I was free. I lay still as a
stone, hardly daring to breathe, hanging on every word of that
incredible conversation.

"Now, you just wait a damn minute," said Mickey, in an ugly tone
I would not have believed could come from the mouth of a man I'd
thought so jolly. "It's not me who double-crossed you, it was the
Sorensons, and they cheated me too, dammit! I killed them for it,
so you're not the only ones had to kill somebody in all this mess.
Like I said, it musta been the Sorensons who wanted those swords
that are so important to you. And I swear to God, it was Fremont
Jones who got the stuff out of the Sorensons' place on Sacramento
before the fire. I was there, I saw her, and I went in and got even
with the Sorensons after. I woulda got rid of Jones for ya too,
only something went wrong with that pistol I gave her that shoulda
misfired and done the trick. Come on, where is she? I'll make her
talk!" He took a couple of heavy steps.

My pistol? He gave me a defective pistol? Carefully I removed my
blindfold and leaned up on my elbows. I would not have been
surprised to find Mickey staring me in the face, but he wasn't. He
was half the warehouse (for my assumption had been correct) away
from me, and one of the Ninjas-they were unmasked now-had taken him
by the arm. The three stood in a circle of light shed by a lantern
placed on the floor. All the rest was shadows.

The Ninja who had Mickey by the arm continued speaking. "The
Jones woman does not know anything, or she would have told us by
now. We spend too much time on her, for nothing. Leave dead things
on steps but she gets guard, so we have to wait. Kill other woman
by mistake, so we have to wait. Jones goes to live in park with
many people, we have to wait. Too much waiting! Tonight, you say,
is the night. You tell us where to go. We make big fear in Flemont
Jones, tear up everything, find nothing."

Nothing,
I thought,
except for a valuable sapphire
which apparently he didn't intend to mention to Mickey.
With a
silent apology to Jim Albright for misjudging him, I removed the
gag and began to inch backward.

The Ninja continued. "We destroy machine which means much to
her, and still she says she knows nothing of our samurai swords.
She has told us the truth, we are sure of this. So now we think you
are the one not telling truth. We do not like this, Mr.
Morelock."

The other Ninja echoed, "We do not like this."

They were circling Mickey now. "You will tell us where to find
the sacred swords of the samurai!"

Mickey pushed at one of the Ninjas, then lunged past him. Mickey
was larger than the two of them together, but the Ninjas had speed
and skill. In a lightning-fast move, graceful as a dance, a Ninja
kicked out at Mickey, spun in the air and kicked again, and Mickey
Morelock went down so heavily the floor shook.

The other Ninja stood over the huge man and said, "You will tell
us now or you will be very, very sorry. Ninja are skilled in ways
of torture which we will be happy to demonstrate."

As much as I might have liked to see that, I decided it was time
for me to leave. The problem was that they were between me and
where, from the sound of their footsteps, I judged the door must
be. Up to now they had paid no attention to me, but if I tried to
move past them, they surely would.

I had never before been in one of these waterside buildings, but
it seemed to me that I'd seen ships anchored between them and goods
being moved in by way of a gangplank along one side. So there must
also be a side entry. I chose the side to my right (praying that it
was
the
right
side) and crawled toward it. Mickey was
blathering on.
Keep it up!
I thought, for as long as they
were occupied with one another I was safe.