Linnear 01 - The Ninja (61 page)

Lee’s death had come as a shock to Nicholas. Not that someone would try to kill him - he knew enough about Lee by that time to understand that the man’s uncompromising nature had become a thorn in some decidedly unsavoury sides - but that an attempt had succeeded. He had always wondered how it had been done; now he thought he knew.

Outside, it was still stifling and, in this place of hot lights, fast food, dirty dope and even dirtier deals, more so than elsewhere.

It took him fifteen minutes to find an empty cab and half that time to reach the Dakota; there was little traffic.

He had stayed at the decaying theatre just long enough to catch one of Lee’s gorgeously choreographed action sequences, motivated, as usual, by revenge. Tonight there seemed nothing artificial about that.

Goldman, dapper as ever in a pale blue pinstripe shirt and midnight-blue linen slacks, met him at the door. He smiled warmly when he saw Nicholas, extending a firm hand. ‘Nick. We were getting worried about you. He turned, still in the doorway. ‘Edna, it’s him.’ He pulled Nicholas inside, pushed a rum on the rocks into his hand. ‘Here. It looks like you need this.’

Edna, a dark-haired chubby woman, bustled into the living room from the swing door to the large kitchen. She beamed, raised her hands. ‘Tateleh!’ She kissed Nicholas on both cheeks. She had the kind of incandescent inner warmth that made mere physical beauty irrelevant. ‘Where have you been so long, you haven’t come to see us?’ Her voice held just the right balance between love and reproach.

He smiled thinly. ‘It’s good to see you both.’

‘That’s it,’ she said as if she had discovered a rare artifact. ‘You’ve lost weight. Come.” She took him by the hand. ‘We eat first. Whatever it is you want to talk to Sam about can wait for a full stomach.’

They ate in the kitchen with the yellow and beige wallpaper and the old West Side fixtures, the oval table of fine-grained mahogany richly waxed, covered with a beautiful embroidered white-on-white tablecloth. A brass Menorah stood on a wall shelf above the table, at its centre.

Afterwards, as Edna cleared the dishes, Sam nodded silently to Nicholas and they excused themselves. Edna kissed them both before they left. ‘Whatever is wrong,’ she told him with absolute faith, ‘you can fix it. Right, Sam? Am I right?’

‘You’re always right.’ He ushered Nicholas into the living room.

Beige and pale green predominated. Edna despised brilliant primaries, perhaps because she saw her childhood on 189th Street in those colours. The effect was a soothing one, like being in a cool forest during the heat of the day.

They sat on the beige velvet couch and Sam put his feet up on a matching ottoman. An antique clock ticked lightly from its owl-like perch on the white marble mantelpiece. A great bunch of dried eucalyptus in a pale pink ceramic vase stood within the grate, wafting its pungent scent into the room. There was a Utrillo on the opposite wall and, on another, a small Dali. In their bedroom, on pale blue walls, were a Picasso and a Calder which, of course, Edna detested. They were all originals but they were displayed with a pleasing lack of ostentation.

‘It has come back,’ Nicholas said softly. ‘All my past, like a great tidal wave.”

Goldman reached for a hardwood box, took out a cigar, lit it slowly.

‘I’ve lost the present somewhere along the line. I no longer know where I am.’

He deliberately blew the blue smoke away from Nicholas. ‘Nicholas, as Shakespeare so cleverly put into Ophelia’s mouth, “We know what we are, but we know not what we may be.”’

‘Sam, I didn’t come here for homilies!’ he exploded.

‘Nor did I mean to give you any.’ He took the cigar out of his mouth, laid it on a crystal ashtray. ‘Look, it is totally unreasonable to expect to know or understand everything about yourself. The human being is such a complex animal that we have to be content to muddle through things as best we can. Some days, it just doesn’t seem nearly enough. At other times…’ He shrugged with some equanimity.

‘I understand all that. But you’re the expert on history. I am only partly a Jew. I haven’t had the training. I don’t -‘

‘It has nothing,’ Goldman said seriously, ‘at all to do with training. One learns the meaning of being a Jew just as one learns the meaning of being a human being - by living life, not by learning the Torah.

‘It comes from what you feel inside and the important thing is that you do not deny what is inside you. Doubt and fears; uncertainty of the present and the future all stem from that. Your self must be free to go in whichever direction it must go.

‘The spirit flies, Nicholas - it is the only thing we possess which can. It is a sin to tie it down, to deny your spirit its breath. Life is nothing without it. We merely survive, from day to day, in a kind of unthinking limbo.

‘Does this answer your question?’

In the night-silence of the tower on Park Avenue, he sat with Raphael Tomkin. At the moment, Tomkin was on the telephone. Somewhere in the world, it was always some time between nine and five and that meant business was rolling. Decisions, vital to one subsidiary or another, and thus vital to the corporation as a whole, required the’ mind of the mover and the shaker. Three continents awaited the outcome of such trans-Atlantic or tram-Pacific conversations.

While Tomkin talked on in mega-figures, a kind of semi-secret corporate shorthand, Nicholas looked at the tiny bit of metal and plastic he held between his fingers. He turned it like a miniature world, though in truth it was only a disk and thus flat, so that it caught the lamplight, its face turning to a slow dazzle.

Just possibly, he thought, this little piece of the electronicized present could be the key to it all. The past, the present and the future. It could end right here, if he chose. If he chose.

And he desperately wanted it to be his decision.

He felt, quite rightly, that Saigo had taken all initiative from him and he felt stripped bare, naked and defenceless because he had not seen what was happening.

Saigo had been leading him around by the nose until he was dizzy, laughing all the way. It was a technique from the Go Rin No Sho. What was its name? To Hold Down a Pillow. Restrict the enemy’s useful actions while encouraging his useless ones. Lead him around as if he had a ring through his nose and, when he is in total confusion, strike.

‘Where’ve you been?’ Tomkin asked, cradling the phone. He looked slightly rumpled at this time of the night, his cream-coloured linen suit wrinkled at the insides of the elbows, his medium-width grey silk knitted tie slightly askew. The flesh of his face had lost the pink glow it maintained for most of the day, seemed pummelled into a kind of uneasy truce - submission was a flat-out impossibility - by the long hours. Lines at the corners of his eyes had become noticeable but they merely made him seem that much more human. Nicholas still felt himself wondering which was the facade.

‘In Chinatown.’

Tomkin grunted, swivelling round in his high-backed leather chair. His hands played idly across his desk’s electronic console as a Greek peasant might fondle his worry beads. ‘Chinatown, huh? With that bastard, Croaker, I’ll bet.’ He stared into Nicholas’s face and his eyes, like chips of blue quartz, were merciless. They were sailor’s eyes, Nicholas thought. The eyes of a man well seasoned to the sardonic tricks of the sea and the open sky. They were the eyes of a survivor; shipwrecked, his crew drowned, this man would make it onto some beachy shore and, like Crusoe, vanquish time though perhaps not solitude. ‘You better not get too friendly with that cop. Just a friendly warning, ‘cause I’m waiting for that motherfucker to step one inch out of line. Then I’m gonna break him in two.’

Nicholas thought about what Croaker had told him of Gelda and he had to smile to himself. What would Tomkin do when he found out that Croaker and his daughter were seeing each other? Apoplexy might be an accurate term.

‘That bastard’s got a hard-on for me and I’ve got no idea why. He’s got this crazy notion that just because I was balling Angela Didion, I killed her.’

Nicholas watched him, rubbing the electronic bug back and forth between the calloused pads of his fingers.

Tomkin snorted derisively through his nostrils, giving Nicholas the image of a horse rearing. ‘Hell, that broad got around, you know? Doing people she didn’t even know. Got a kick out of that, giving rim jobs to guys she pulled off the street. Just like that - Boom! Only it wasn’t always guys, see. The broad was nuts. Definitely nuts. If I’d’ve known about that -you know, a closet lezzie - I wouldn’t have - hell, she disguised it well enough.’ He waved a hand and gold glinted. ‘Anyway, it’s all ancient history now - that’s how I see it. But that cop won’t let it alone, you know? He’s like a fucking dog with an old bone nobody wants but him.’

‘He’s doing his job.’

‘He ain’t doing his job!’ Tomkin cried. ‘That’s the whole goddamned issue.’ He pounded the table. ‘The Angela Didion thing is a dead issue for everyone on the entire fucking New York Police Force except Croaker. What’s he think he’s got? A calling from God? Well, I’m telling you, he’s got nothing. I got his number; loves to see his name in the papers.’ He swivelled back and forth in his chair, very fast, as if he had a surplus of nervous energy. ‘Goddamned glory hound. He’s not gonna ride me to any headlines. He needs to be taught a lesson, that’s all.’ He glanced up, no longer half-talking to himself. ‘What about this guy - the ninja?’

‘Well, that’s what I came to talk to you about. So far, he’s been setting the pace. What I think we have to do now is reverse the situation. We have a chance if we can control the environment. We have to, in other words, be on the battleground before him.’

‘So? Set it up. That’s what I’m paying you for, isn’t it?’

‘It’s not that simple, unfortunately.’

‘Well, do what you have to do. I don’t care what it is. I want him out of the way. Permanently.’

‘It involves you directly.’

‘Of course it does. He’s been sent here to kill me.”

‘He’s here to kill me, too.’

‘What?’

‘I know this man. There is an old score to be settled. It’s nothing to do with you.’

‘I see.’

‘Except that it may lead us to his entrapment.’

‘How?’

‘Through one of his bugs.’ Nicholas lifted the tiny disk so that Tomkin could see it clearly. ‘You see, this is currently inactive. It’s one of the new contact type, which simply means that once it is reapplied to a surface, it becomes active again.’

A gleam came into Tomkin’s icy eyes; deceit was a currency he understood. ‘You mean -‘

‘We reactivate it. And use it. Chances are he’ll believe there’s been a minor dysfunction and -‘

‘What if he’s smarter than that? This guy’s an expert. I’ve heard stories about ninja -‘

‘I don’t,’ said Nicholas, ‘think it will matter at all. He wants us both and, if he thinks he can get us together, he’ll take the chance, even if there’s the suspicion of a trap. It’s one I’ve set up, you see. It’s a challenge and he cannot back down without losing an awful lot of face. That he will not do.’

‘It amounts to inviting him over,’ Tomkin said slowly.

‘Yes.’

The blue eyes regarded him cannily. Nicholas could almost hear the sound of his mind ticking-over, weighing probabilities just as if he were making a computer-assisted business decision. But then, in a curious kind of way, it was a business decision.

‘Let’s do it.’ His voice rang unhesitatingly.

Afterwards, as Nicholas detached the bug and dropped it into the thick cotton bed he had fashioned for it in one of the desk drawers, Tomkin said, ‘Can everything be arranged by the night after next?”

‘There won’t be any problem.’

‘Good.’ He picked up the phone as Nicholas turned to leave. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘you didn’t tell me you were having problems with Justine.’

Nicholas froze, silently cursing Tomkin. Had he been spying on his daughter again? How else would he know?

‘Hit a nerve, didn’t I?’ He laughed. ‘You got a damn good poker-face but I don’t need to see your expression to know.’

‘Just what do you know?’

Tomkin shrugged. ‘Just that she’s in the city; out with another guy. Don’t know who he is but I will soon enough.’ He ^ dropped his eyes, began to dial. ‘It’s too bad, really. I would’ve liked you two to stay together. You’re good for her. Now I’m afraid she’s gone back to her old ways.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Hello? Yes-‘

‘Tomkin -‘ Nicholas’s tone cut through the space between them.

‘Hold the line a moment -‘ Tomkin put his palm over the receiver. ‘What did you say?’ His voice had turned a touch treacley.

‘Where is she?’

‘At a discotheque. On West Forty-sixth Street.’ He rummaged with one hand on his desktop. ‘I know I have the name of it somewhere. At least, I had it earlier … Ah, here it is.’ He read off a slip of paper, giving Nicholas the name. His eyes lifted. ‘Know it?’

‘I don’t go to discos, normally,” Nicholas said. His voice was as tight as a coiled spring. Across from him, Tomkin looked as if he had devoured a particularly tasty sweet.

‘No, I suppose not. Otherwise you might have run into her before this. It’s an old hangout of hers. Perhaps you ought to try it some time.’ He turned away to the phone in dismissal.

For a time he spoke as part of a conversation that had no meaning, listening with his free ear to the sound of the elevator’s doors sighing shut, the quiet hum of the machine as it took Nicholas down to the lobby far below.

When that sound had ceased, he reached out one hand and opened a desk drawer. Without turning his head, he replaced the receiver of the phone.

He stared down at the bit of plastic and metal with a kind of rapt fascination. A light line of sweat broke out on his forehead, the way it did every time he made a major business decision. His heart thudded and his pulse rate increased.

He licked his lips and, carefully, deliberately, he brought the bug out of its bed and attached it to the side of his desk.

He swung round, away from it so that he looked out on the winking late-night face of the city. West. The entire country was before him though, of course, he could not see it. At length he began to speak.