Linnear 01 - The Ninja (48 page)

Tomkin settled himself more comfortably against the plush velvet seat. ‘Might as well go somewhere now that we’re out.”

He flicked a switch, gave the chauffeur an address on the West Side. ‘I’m hungry. How about you?’ > ‘I could eat something.”

‘Okay. Good.’ He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘I don’t want anything to happen to my girls, understand?’

Nicholas said nothing. He was thinking about what Croaker had told him about this man. He was wondering about the truth.

Tomkin turned his head sharply like a dog at the point. I’m quite certain you think I don’t give a shit about them. I can imagine the kind of fantasies Justine has told you about me.’

‘She really doesn’t talk about you much. Does that surprise you?’

‘Don’t be impertinent with me,’ Tomkin said coldly. ‘It won’t get you very far.’ His voice softened somewhat. ‘But, to be quite frank, I am surprised she hasn’t told you all about me.’ He waved a hand as if in dismissal. ‘It doesn’t matter, really. I still love them both. I know I’m not the world’s best father but then they leave a lot to be desired as daughters. Let’s just say we’re all at fault.’

‘Perhaps if you didn’t use your power with them the way -‘

‘Ah, then she did talk about me.’

‘A bit, yes. Once.’

‘My dear boy,’ Tomkin said, ‘I don’t mean to be pompous but money is power or, more accurately, it’s the other way round. It amounts to the same thing. That’s my gift, you see. It’s what I excel in. Making decisions, building power, watching the money pour in.’ He lifted a knowing forefinger to the side of his nose; absurdly, it made him look like an avuncular character out of a Dickens novel. ‘It’s also what keeps me alive. I’d be dead tomorrow without that excitement; I can’t give it up for anyone, not even my girls.’

‘Would you even want to?’

‘To be honest, I don’t know.’ He shrugged heavily. ‘But what possible difference could that make? It’s a moot point. I don’t love them any less for it; I’m merely denied certain things.’

‘So are they.’

‘Life is tough, huh? I’m glad you figured that out.’ He turned his head. ‘I guess I was right about you. I like the way you work.”

They crossed Fifth Avenue on Fifty-seventh, heading west. Heavy traffic brought them to a standstill midway along the block. Behind them was the white modernistic sweep of Seven West. Fuel exhaust and the heat combined to streak the air as it rose in waves from the asphalt of the street.

‘You know,’ Tomkin said while they were stalled, ‘money’s a funny thing. Most people who don’t have it want it very badly. But the ones who have it, if they have any sense at all, know what a fantastic burden it is. There are mornings I don’t want to get up and go to the office, despite the excitement. I feel as if my body weighs tons, as if every breath I take is made painful by pressure.’ Up ahead, at Sixth Avenue, the light turned green. No one moved. After a moment, horns started blaring.

‘But there are decisions to be made,’ he continued. ‘Decisions involving millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of my employees throughout the world. There’s nobody but me to make them.’ His voice turned reflective. ‘That’s excitement enough, don’t you think? To know you’re performing something in a way no one else can. You know about that as well as I do, eh? You do what you do better than anyone else.’

‘And what’s that?’

Tomkin’s eyes narrowed as if he were looking through cigarette smoke. ‘You’re a very deadly man, Nick. Don’t think I can’t feel it. Even before I saw what you could do with Frank and Whistle. Oh, it was nice to see a graphic example of what had been in my mind’s eye, of course. But I was as certain of you as I have been of anything. To tell you the truth, I’m glad Justine likes you - I think you’ll be good for her. She should get to know what a real man’s like.’

The light had turned red again but the horns hadn’t diminished.

‘What’s the problem, Tom?’ he said into the grille.

‘Bus broken down, Mr Tomkin,’ came the electronically filtered reply. ‘Won’t be long now.’

‘Buses,’ Tomkin said, readjusting his position. ‘Christ, I haven’t been on a bus in over thirty years.’

‘Money’ll do that to you,’ Nicholas said blandly.

‘The only thing that money does,’ Tomkin said sharply, ‘is corrupt.’

Nicholas turned his head. ‘Does that include you?’

‘We’re all susceptible; we all succumb. There’re no exceptions, none at all. In that respect, money’s the great leveller. It makes fools of us all.’ He barked a laugh. ‘All those assholes who tell you that money hasn’t changed ‘em are full of shit. Of course it has. They just like to stare at illusions they build for themselves. As for me, I’m a realist. I take the drawbacks and accept them. Everything has its price tag - you just gotta make sure you got enough to pay.

‘Now take my late wife, for example. Jesus, there was a woman who knew sure as hell what she wanted only she didn’t have the guts to come to grips with what went along with it. People like her, they piss me off no end, ‘cause all they want is to stand and squat in a stream all day long while someone comes and wipes their asses for them three times a day. You think they ever heard of the word responsibility? Not a chance.’

They began to move now and the limo slid to a stop at the far corner where Wolf’s Delicatessen stood.

‘Come on,’ Tomkin said. ‘I don’t know about you but I can’t wait to taste a Number One Combination.’

Behind them, in the limo, the second bug, perfectly hidden under the carpet, remained undetected and undisturbed.

‘You’re not impressed?’

‘It seems like a lot of space for one person.’

‘I’m claustrophobic.’

Croaker laughed. ‘Yeah, well. I could see where you wouldn’t be in this place.’ He came back from the windows overlooking the East River and Queens. His fingers stroked the butter-soft leather of the brown couch.

‘Beautiful,’ he murmured.

‘It gets a lot of attention.’ Her topaz eyes regarded him playfully. ‘Why, Lieutenant, I believe you’re blushing. Don’t tell me you’ve never met anyone of my profession before - that would be too much to swallow.’

He groaned at the deliberate double entendre. ‘Do you always talk like that?’

‘Only when I’m - only occasionally.’ He wondered what she

had been going to say. ‘Hey, I’m hungry.’ Immediately her face fell. ‘But, oh, there’s nothing here -‘

‘That’s okay, I’ve got to -‘

‘Oh, don’t go. Please. Not yet, anyway.’ She crossed the room to the phone. ‘You deserve some time off - at least to eat. And they know where to reach you if something really hot comes up.”

Yeah, he thought. Like the address of the lady who’ll nail your old man to the bathroom wall. He felt immediately embarrassed and wondered why. He’d never felt that way before.

Gelda had her ear to the receiver, was saying, ‘I’ll order us up some food. How about Italian? Do you like Italian food? I love it.’

‘Okay. Fine.’

She nodded, dialled a number, waited a moment. ‘Philip,’ she said. ‘It’s G. Yeah, fine. What about you? You sure? You sound a little funny. No? Hey, how’d you like to get me some food. Mario’s, yeah. For two. You know what. Okay. ‘Bye.’ She turned round.

‘Who’s Philip?’ he asked. ‘Not a runner or something stupid like that? You wouldn’t do something like that to me, would you?’

‘Don’t worry. No. He’s just a kid who hangs around. Does stuff for some - of us.’ She saw the look on his face. ‘Cut it out. He’s got no family but us. We all love him and he knows it. Is that monstrous?’

He smiled. ‘Sounds all right.” He moved round to the front of the couch, sat down, ‘Feels nice.’

She followed him, said when she was very close, standing over him, ‘You should feel it without clothes on.”

He gave a slightly uncomfortable laugh.

Gelda walked towards the bedroom doorway. She began to take off her silk blouse. Before she had disappeared through the doorway, he had seen the flawless expanse of her naked back. Despite the fullness of her breasts, she wore no bra.

‘What are you doing?’ He got up from the couch, stood uneasily with his hands in his pockets.

‘Just changing.’ He heard her voice drift back to him. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t attack you.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of that,’ he said not quite honestly.

‘Good.’

He heard the sensuous rustle of silk against firm flesh.

‘Do you want to come in,’ she said, ‘so I can see you while we talk?’

Tm all right out here.’ He felt like a schoolboy on his first real date.

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘you’ve seen my mind. I can’t imagine what would embarrass you about seeing my body.’

‘Nothing,’ he said automatically.

‘All right, then.’

He stood where he was for a moment, feeling an outsider in this plush yet intimate landscape. In his mind, he tried to summon up clear images of what she did here but he could find nothing. He had an active imagination; at the moment it had shut down entirely.

He walked to the doorway, stood looking in on the threshold, a voyeur at his first peephole.

She stood with one leg up on the bedspread, putting on a stocking. A stocking, he thought, not panty hose. The perfect foot was dark, the flesh shining through the silk mesh so that the black was made pale, an altogether new colour. The toes indented the spread as if she had stepped along the crest of a sand dune. Her legs seemed endless.

She wore bikini panties, a girdle, both flesh-coloured, soft and lacy. Otherwise, she was nude. The effect was startling.

She twisted her head over her shoulder to look at him. Her topaz eyes were very light. She smiled ingenuously. ‘There.’ The voice was but a wisp. ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’

‘I wish you’d put on some clothes.’

She walked across the room. He tried not to stare at the movement of her breasts at each step but he had given himself an impossible task. When she reached the wardrobe she raised her arms and his temperature at the same time. She drew out a forest-green satin robe, came towards him. ‘Is that better, Lew - I can call you Lew? After all, I threw up all over you in the van; I ought to be able to call you by your first name. At the very least.’ She brushed by him, went into the living room with the ghost of a smile.

He detached himself from the doorjamb, wondering what he was doing still here; always on the job, that’s me, he thought. But what was really on his mind was his dark apartment crouching as deserted as Wall Street at a weekend waiting for him to return. Going home to that seemed as out of the question as when it had been filled with Alison’s scent.

‘Should we go to bed now or after the food gets here?’ He could not quite keep the anger out of his voice. There was a degree of control he felt had abandoned him some time when his attention had been elsewhere.

Gelda turned in the middle of the room. Her belted robe opened as if on cue and he saw the gleaming length of one leg. ‘Is that what you think?’ She was still smiling softly, like the gentle glow from a heavily shaded lamp.

‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’

‘Is it?’ One eyebrow arched. ‘You know my sexual preference.’

Of course, he had forgotten. Deliberately? He felt an idiot. He put his hands in his pockets again, turned away too embarrassed to apologize. Mental sets, he thought savagely. Isn’t it odd how the eyes see one thing and the mind - that great complex monstrosity - makes leaps of illogicality to form conclusions. He felt, abruptly, just as he had that scorching summer’s day in Hell’s Kitchen when not even the turned-on hydrants helped, when the steaming air hung like layers of blankets your well-meaning but misguided mother had wrapped you in when sick, impossible to take off. Tempers were short and incendiary as if everyone had an itch they couldn’t scratch.

The cry came through the wide-open window and he was racing down the dark narrow stairs and into the baking sunshine. Just two doors away, he lay in the alley, his uniform dark with sweat and blood. Trash cans lay tumbled around him, having divulged their slimy secrets as if in one last paroxysm. The grey eyes were open and already glazing; eyes that had always reminded him of a storm-tossed sky. Gentle eyes.

So this was how it ended for Martin Croaker. After twenty-nine years on the New York City Police Force, lying sprawled in an alley piled high with garbage, surrounded by summer stink, fearful rats and incurious roaches, the wail of sirens forlorn in the distance, closing, shot four times forty feet from his own home.

He stared down at the corpse of his father and the world had spun around, canted dangerously on its axis. He felt that, at any moment, its momentum and crazy angle would combine to throw him off.

That’s what he wanted, of course, to run far, far away from this stinking hole; never to return. Never.

But that was the easy way out; the coward’s way. Not Lew Croaker’s way. His father had taught him too well.

So he stayed on. To join the police. Old and grey, his mother had come to his Academy graduation and had cried as he was sworn in.

He had never found the man responsible for his father’s death but, after a time, that pain, too, had been put to rest.

He felt her touch his arm; he hadn’t realized the wound was still sensitive. After all this time.

Tm sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have teased you. I was just…’

‘What? You were just what?’

Her eyes lowered. ‘Happy to be with you.’ She tried to make a half joke out of it, failed. ‘You make me feel…”

‘What?’

She looked up. ‘Just feel.’

He felt torn. ‘I bet you could do that and not feel a thing.’

She nodded. ‘I could. I’m an actress, of course. Do you distrust me? You couldn’t. Not after what you said to me in the van. You took an enormous chance, telling me what you suspect about my father. It was an idiotic thing to do.’

‘That’s me. Always the idiot.’

‘Yes.’ Her voice was as soft as silk.

‘You know, you could sell me anything.’ He said it defensively, because she was so close. He wanted her to know he knew. He felt he needed that precaution now.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t. Not now, anyway.’ She put her fingers along his arm; they seemed very warm. The challenge, for myself, is to be honest with you. It’s what will make me happy.”