Linnear 01 - The Ninja (4 page)

‘Was your father American?’

She turned her face towards him and the warm glow from the living-room lamps burnished one cheek as if by an artist’s brush. ‘Very American.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Let’s go inside,’ she said, turning from him. ‘I’m cold.’

First there was the large black and white photograph of a rather heavy-set man with a firm jaw and undaunted eyes. Printed underneath was the legend: Stanley. Teller, Chief of Police 1932-1964. Next to that was a framed copy of Norman Rockwell’s The Runway.

The office was a spare cubicle with double windows overlooking the courtyard parking lot. There was not much to see out there, this time of the evening.

‘Why don’t you cut the doubletalk, Doc, and run it by me in plain English,’ Lieutenant Ray Florum said. ‘Just what’s so special about this drowning?”

The subdued crackle of the two-way radio down the hall was a constant background chatter, like being on the telephone with a crossed line.

‘That’s just what I’ve been trying to explain to you,” Doc Deerforth said slowly and patiently. ‘This man did not die of drowning.”

Ray Florum sat down in his wooden swivel chair. It creaked beneath his weight. Florum was a big man, both in height and girth, which made him the butt of a series of ongoing jokes batted about good-naturedly among his staff. He was commanding officer of the Village Police of West Bay Bridge. He had a beery-cheeked face on which was positioned dead centre, as if it were the bull’s-eye of some target, a bulbous red-veined nose. His skin was tanned to the colour of cured leather; his salt-and-pepper hair was cut en brosse. He wore a brown Dacron suit not because he liked it but because he had to. He would just as soon have come to work in a flannel shirt and a pair of old slacks. ‘What, then,’ Florum said equally slowly, ‘did he die from?’

‘He was poisoned,’ Doc Deerforth said. ‘Doc,’ Florum said as he wearily rubbed his hand over his face. ‘I want this to be real clear, understand? Crystal clear. So perfectly clear that there won’t be any possibility of a misunderstanding when I make out my report. Because, beside the State Detectives who, I’m sure you’re aware, I’m gonna have to copy on this - and when I do, they’re gonna be down here like locusts on a wheat-field asking us to do all their goddamned field work and then sucking us dry - beside those sonsabitches, I’ve gotta contend with the county bastards who’re most probably gonna claim that this thing’s in their jurisdiction. And, to top it all off, now that you tell me it’s a murder, I’m gonna have Flower rumbling in from Hauppauge on his white horse wondering why our investigation is taking so long and when’s he gonna be relieved of the stiff, his staff’s so overworked.’ Florum slammed the flat of his hand down on the cover of a copy of Crime in the United States, 1979. ‘Well, this time they’re just gonna have to wait long enough so that they’re one great step behind me.’

A sergeant came in, handed Florum several typewritten sheets and went out without a word.

‘Christ, it makes my blood boil sometimes. I’m no goddamned politician. That’s what this job calls for. Who the hell cares whether I know police procedure or not. God!’ But he got up, still, and came back with a file which he opened on his desk. He ran a hand through his hair, scratched at his scalp. He began to shift through a number of eight-by-ten black and white prints which, even upside down, Doc Deerforth recognized as shots of the drowned man.

‘First of all,’ Doc Deerforth said calmly. ‘I’ve taken care of

Flower. He won’t bother you, at least for the time being.’

Florum looked up briefly, inquisitively, then his gaze returned to the photos. ‘Yeah, how’d you work that little miracle?’

‘I haven’t told him yet.’

‘You mean to say,’ Florum said, as he reached out an oblong magnifying-glass from a desk drawer, ‘that nobody knows about this … murder but us chickens right here in this room?”

‘That’s precisely what I mean,” Doc Deerforth said quietly.

After a time, Florum said, ‘You know, there’s nothing shows up on these photos.’ He shuffled the photos like a deck of cards until a close-up of the head and chest of the drowned man was on top. ‘Nothing but a routine drowning.’

‘You won’t find anything there.’

‘That’s what I said.’

‘Doesn’t mean, though, that there isn’t anything to see.’

Florum sat back in his chair and crossed his hands over his ample belly. ‘Okay, Doc. I’m all ears. You tell me about it.’

‘What it boils down to is this. The man was dead before he even hit the water.’ Doc Deerforth sighed. ‘It was something that might have been overlooked by even as good an M.E. as Flower.’ Florum grunted but said nothing. ‘Look, there is a small traumatic puncture wound in the man’s chest, middle-left, and it could easily have been mistaken for a rock scrape -which it is not. The puncture led me to take blood samples, one of which was from the aorta, where this type of poison concentrates; it’s flushed from the rest of the bloodstream within perhaps twenty minutes of death, by what means I have no idea. It’s a highly unusual cardiovascular poison.’

Florum snapped his fingers. ‘Proof! Heart attack.’

‘Yes.’

‘You sure about this?’

‘About the poison, yes. Otherwise you know I wouldn’t have come to you. But I’ve still got some more tests to run. It appears likely that a sliver of whatever punctured the man’s flesh is still lodged in his sternum.” ‘There’s no exit wound?’

‘No.’

‘The fall could have dislodged it. Or the sea -‘

‘Or it was pulled free after the man fell.’

‘What you’re saying, Doc…’ He paused and, pushing aside the photos, consulted a filled-out preprinted form. “This guy, Barry Braughm, an account executive at’ - here he named Sam Goldman’s advertising agency in New York - ‘lived at three-oh-one East Sixty-third, was murdered. But in this way? For what reason? He was out here alone. No jealous wife or boyfriend…” He laughed. ‘He’s got a sister in Queens whom we’ve already contacted and interviewed. We checked on his house on Dune Road. Nada. No sign of it being broken into or even that anything was taken. His car was where he had driven it up and parked it in front of the house as secure as Fort Knox. There’s nothing to -‘

‘There’s this,’ Doc Deerforth said, knowing that, at last, he had come to the moment he had been dreading ever since he had discovered the puncture wound and, subsequently, had pulled the blood from the drowned man’s heart. It isn’t possible, he kept telling himself, all the time his hands and eyes were running the tests that were confirming it; saying it over and over to himself like a litany against evil. And he felt now rather out of himself, a dreamlike unreality that allowed him to sit in another part of this room and watch himself talking to Ray Florum just as if he were an actor in some film.

From outside there came the sound of a child’s laughter, harsh and brittle in the night, transformed by some aural magic into an eerie, other-worldly sound, the mocking shrillness of the macaws’ cries in the Philippine jungle.

‘It’s the poison,’ he continued.- ‘It’s a very specific type.’ He ran his palms down the sides of his trousers. It had been a long time since he had felt his hands wet with sweat. ‘I came across this particular compound when I was stationed overseas.”

‘During the war?’ Florum said. ‘But, good God, man, that’s thirty-six years ago. Do you mean to tell me -‘

‘I could not forget this poison, Ray, no matter how many years have passed. A patrol went out one night. Five men. Only one returned and he just made it to the perimeter. We’d heard no shots; nothing but the birds and the buzz of the insects … It was odd, that kind of stillness, almost creepy; we’d been fired upon by snipers all through the day and every day for about a week.’ Doc Deerforth took a deep breath before plunging onwards. Anyway, they brought me the man who’d come back. He was a boy, really. No more than nineteen. He was still alive and I began to work on him. I did everything I could, everything in and out of the book, but I was helpless. He literally died before my eyes.”

‘Dying of this stuff?’

Doc Deerforth nodded bleakly. ‘The same.’

‘Do you want me to go?’ Nicholas asked her.

‘Yes,’ Justine said. ‘No. I don’t know.’ She stood behind the couch, her fingers pulled distractedly at the tufted Haitian cotton. ‘My God, but you confuse me.’

‘I don’t mean to,’ he offered.

‘Words don’t mean anything.”

He was quite startled to see that her face in profile seemed remarkably different, as if he were seeing her now from the perspective of a different age, some other life. In this respect, she reminded him of Yukio. Of course with Yukio he had always imagined it to be the diverse mixture of her heritage, shrouded in some mysterious world to which he did not belong and to which he had brought but the insight of an alien. That, he knew now, had been a purely Westernized response to what was, quite obviously, inexplicable and it somehow confounded him that here, in the West, it should strike him so differently. Perhaps it was but the passage of time - a certain distancing from the anguish - which enabled him at last to see Yukio for what she really was, to him and to those around him. It was, he thought, the space he had gained from all the ramified, ritualized patterns of his life in Japan, which allowed him to realize the mistakes he had committed, to understand the role of his participation in it all.

Justine stirred on the other side of the couch, as far from him as if she were in another country, and he smelled her fragrance.

‘It’s late,’ she said. But it made no sense, was meant, he supposed, to fill a void that was becoming too threatening for her.

Bur this kind of inner tension was one of the things that most intrigued him about her. Oh yes, she was extraordinarily beautiful in his eyes; if he had passed her on a busy Manhattan street, he would surely have turned his head, even, perhaps, followed her into Bendel’s or Botticelli before he lost her in a swelling crowd; what else does he do with that kind of fantasy? When one followed them up, one was invariably disappointed. Then she would have been on his mind for an hour or so. But so what? Physical beauty, he had learned quite early, was the arbiter of nothing, could even be a dangerous and bloody thing. More than anything else, he needed a challenge, with women as much as with all the interests in his life. For he felt quite deeply that nothing in life was worth possessing without a struggle - even love; especially love. This too he had learned in Japan, where women were like flowers one had to unfold like origami, with infinite care and deliberateness finding that, when fully opened, they were filled with exquisite tenderness and devious violence.

Just the creamy splash of the surf now, the record gathering dust on the immobile turn-table. There came the cry of a gull, lonely and querulous as if it had somehow lost its way.

He wondered what he had to do; whether he really wanted to do anything. After all, there was fear inside him, too.

‘Have you been with many women?’ she asked abruptly. He saw that her arms, as rigid as pillars, were trembling and that she had brought her head up with an effort. She stared at him, daring him to deride her or, perhaps, revile her, confirming her suspicions of him and, more generally, of men.

‘That’s an odd question to ask.’

She turned her head slightly and he saw the warm lamplight define the bridge of her nose, slide down into the hollow beneath one eye, at the crest of her neck. The crimson motes were like points of burnished brass; the right side of her face was entirely in shadow. ‘Will you answer it?’

He smiled. ‘Some that I’ve not cared about. Few that I have.”

And all the while she watched his eyes for any hint that he might be mocking her. She found none.

‘What is it you wish to know, Justine?’ he said softly. ‘Are you afraid I won’t tell you?”

‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m afraid that you will.’ Her nails plucked at the nubs of cotton as a musician fingers the strings of a harp. ‘I want to and I don’t want to,’ she said after a while.

He was about to say, with a smile, that it wasn’t so serious but he realized that it was; he knew what she was talking about. He came around the end of the sofa, stood by her. ‘It’s only me, Justine,’ he said, ‘who’s here. There’s only the two of us.’

‘I know.’ But it was not enough because she had said it like a little girl who did not quite believe what she was saying, wanting only some outside reassurance for an important inner act.

She broke away from this tight orbit, perhaps feeling the increasing magnetism beginning to influence the balance, and went across the room to stand in front of the large window. The outside lights were still on, and beyond the porch and the fluttering pitiful moths the sea broke endlessly onto the shore, the sand now as dark as coal.

‘You know, for some reason this view reminds me of San Francisco.’

‘When were you there?’ he asked, coming round and sitting on one arm of the sofa.

‘About two years ago, I guess. I was there for eighteen months, almost.’

‘Why’d you leave?’

‘I - broke up with someone. Came back here. Returned to the East, the prodigal daughter, into the bosom of her family.’ For some reason that struck her as funny, but the laugh seemed to strangle and die in her throat.

‘You loved the city.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I did that. Very much.”

‘Then why leave it?’

‘I - had to.’ She lifted her slim hand, then looked at it, surprised that it was in that position. ‘I was a different person then. Not at all secure.’ She clasped her hands in front of her, arms extended downwards. ‘I was so vulnerable. I felt - I guess I felt that I couldn’t stay there by myself. There was a kind of wind sailing through me.’ As if it were an afterthought, she said, ‘It was a stupid situation. / was stupid.’ She shook her head as if she still could not believe how she had acted.

‘I’ve been there twice,’ Nicholas said. ‘San Francisco, I mean. I fell in love with it. Its size; its whiteness viewed from Mill Valley.’ He was watching the thin line of phosphorescence, almost transparent, that marked the rise of the surf and its subsequent fall to earth, coming in, coming in. ‘I used to go down to the shore just to watch the Pacific and think: Here are these waves rolling in, rolling all the way across the world from Japan.’