Linnear 01 - The Ninja (62 page)

‘I suppose,’ he said, almost meditatively, ‘it depends on how much you want him. But what if - what if I could guarantee Nicholas Linnear. I could hand him to you on a platter. As easy as pie, yes?’ He swung round and now he addressed directly the bug hanging like a bloated spider. ‘I’ll bet that’s worth a lot to you. As much as a life. What do you say?’

He reached out and detached the bug, returning it to its drawer, precisely as Nicholas had placed it. Tomkin was a meticulous man.

Then he sat back with his hands behind his head, waiting for the phone call he was certain would come. The fully loaded pistol clinging in its holster to his damp shirt beneath his suit jacket felt heavy and warm and infinitely comforting. In matters like this, he thought, one never knew.

‘Someone wants to see you.’

The phone had rung just after Croaker had walked in but, despite that and despite the fact that she had already put the machine on, Gelda had picked it up herself.

She had come into the living room to answer the door and both of them were still there in the semi-darkness. She watched him now as she listened to the voice in her ear, as he stood in the oblique bars of light and dark so that they climbed his legs to just above his knees. His face was illumined by the fat wedge of lemon light from the bedroom.

‘G, are you there?’

‘Yes, Pear.’

‘I thought you had drifted away for a moment. Have you popped anything?’

‘Not tonight, no.’

He seemed afflicted with a weariness that went far beyond a lack of sleep. It was as if all the endless hours in the office and on the streets and in the courtrooms had built up a sly accretion impossible to discard which now lay heavily upon him like a grey and ageless second skin.

‘Just a professional question,’ Pear said, mistaking Gelda’s silence as an expression of annoyance, ‘that’s all. Seeing as how there’s-‘

‘Not tonight.’

‘I know I haven’t given you any notice. That’s because it’s the Senator.’

Gelda knew what that meant. ‘Get him someone else.’

‘G,’ Pear said slowly and patiently, ‘he wants you. There is no one else. You know how he is.’

He stood there in the half-light like some mythic animal come to life; a creature someone had mistakenly dressed in human clothes. He seemed only partially aware of her.

‘The answer’s still no.’ She could not be more aware of him.

‘And what of Dare when she comes to town again?’ Pear had obviously caught something in Gelda’s tone of voice.

And, abruptly, Gelda knew that she had answered the phone

because he was here. ‘No. Even for Dare. Those days are gone. I am out.’

‘I see.’ There was no hurt in Pear’s voice, no hint of recrimination.

Gelda felt light-headed, as giddy as if she had just consumed an entire bottle of Dom Perignon. She also felt happier than she ever had before.

‘We’ll miss you, G. I’ll miss you.’ It was like Pear, at a moment like this, not to mention the clients.

‘I’ll never forget you,’ Gelda whispered.

A soft laugh. ‘I should hope not. Goodbye, G.”

Gelda put down the receiver, went over to Croaker. ‘What happened?’ She put her arm round him, walking him into the bedroom.

In the warm lamplight, she saw the dried blood on his hands. ‘Won’t you tell me?’ she said in a voice calmer than she felt. ‘You look so sad.”

‘I’ve just come from seeing two families. A pregnant wife and a mother of three small kids.’ He looked at her despairingly. ‘Have you ever had to tell someone that the person she cares most about is dead?’ He took a deep breath. ‘Well, I have. But never before when I knew those deaths were my fault.’ He stared at his brown hands, stained as if they had been dipped in dye, crusty as if covered in sea salt.

‘Why don’t we start at the beginning,’ she said softly, taking his hands in hers, drawing him forward. “The blood has to come off first.’

I knew what I was doing! I knew right from the start
I knew where I was going
There’s radar in my heart…

The place was all mirrored chrome and black smoked glass, multi-levelled like the hanging gardens with floors of translucent glass under which coloured lights flashed in time to the music.

The air vibrated with percussion and electric voices, strung like a Christmas tree with garlands of perfume and perspiration and burning pot.

I felt your contact coming
Your star was on my chart
I heard your motors humming / Got radar in my heart…

Somewhere was the bar, obscured behind a forest of raised arms, swirling hair, shiny, mindlessly concentrating faces. Dance dance dance: the imperative was clear, treading an atavistic path, the primitive’s tribal revivals, an ecstatic communal orgy, trivialized to the point where all possible consequences were nullified.

The posters on your walls mark every fashion’s rise and fall / Why try to keep the past alive/ And though I know the time is almost 1984 I It feels like 1965…

Like moving through a dream. All senses assailed relentlessly until distortion grew like weeds in the abandoned front yard of reality. Every step forward carried with it the burden of two in retrograde. He thought of Alice down the rabbit’s hole and wondered if Carroll could have had this in mind. Only Coleridge might have dreamsmoked this up; it seemed the habitat of a damaged archangel.

The music in my room is always slightly out of tune j My harmony is up on trial
And though I know the rhythm you’d prefer me dancing to
I’ll turn my revolt into style…

At the bar there were leather-padded seats on which no one sat, a line of jackdaws ironically eyeing a busy cornfield in summer.

Nicholas sat and ordered a drink for form’s sake. He was not thirsty. He watched the lame glitter in the spiralling lights, the neon shoes with heels impossibly high. Multicoloured eye makeup seemed to cover half the faces of women who turned towards him again and again in the course of the dance. Flesh was entirely incidental, it seemed; arms and breasts and thighs were painted like lizard skin. Their expressions recalled to him vivid scenes from Metropolis.

He was searching for Justine, but in this madhouse it seemed useless: like running after Yukio in Kumamoto. Doors closing in his face as fast as they were opened.

Then what Sam had said to him earlier in the evening began to seep through into his consciousness. What difference did it make what he was now as long as he knew that he wanted to be; what he wanted. It was no longer 1963, part of another lifetime. But he knew that he would never truly be free until he understood it all. Without understanding, he knew, assimilation was impossible. The kijin - the goblins of his past - would be appeased by nothing less.

‘What are you doing? C’mon, c’mon, c’mon and dance.’

She was a sloe-eyed blonde in a lavender crepe de chine dress which showed off her ample breasts to maximum effect.

I feel life a wog
People give me the eyes
But I was born just life you you you…

‘Don’t you wanna’ - her bird’s head swayed seductively -‘get in the swing? C’mon, c’mon.’

‘No, I don’t think -‘

- life a wog
I don’t mean you no harm
I just want to shine your shoes …

‘- apricorn, right? You must be. Dour.’ She pronounced it dower. ‘All Capricorns are dour. But -‘

‘I’m not here to dance,’ he said, feeling foolish. ‘I’m here to find someone.’

Golly gee
Golly gosh
Don’t call me your golliwog …

‘- do it together.’

Don’t call me, don’t call me, don’t call me/ I’ll call you if I want you…

You don’t understand. There is a woman here. A woman.’

‘So?’ She took his hand, crimson nails gleaming, changing colours, lines of light flicking. ‘Let’s dance, dance, dance until we find her.’

He broke away from her grip.

‘Don’t you want to have fun?’ she cried after him.

- made me feel life, feel life, feel life a wog …

Went up to the second level, blues and greens like a grotto of waving kelp. Synchronization had begun to set in and he felt his pulse throbbing to the beat of the music flailing the air with the abandon of a reaper at his wheat-field.

And, at last, he saw her on the highest level, partly obscured by the scaffolding of the circular staircase. He had to wait several minutes, the narrow path clotted and blocked: dancing up, dancing down.

Disappearing in a wave of arms and heads bobbing and he went up the iron stairs two at a time. Black leather walls like a padded cell, smoked glass far too fragile for the height: what if someone should stumble in thrall and fall? What then?

Light in reds and yellows, turning white and grey against the black leather, disconcerting, like seeing a colour TV show on an ancient set: everything somehow just slightly out of phase.

There she was. With a tall broad-shouldered man with lank black hair and the sallow skin of a Puerto Rican. He wore a sleeveless shirt with a red, blue and gold Point Beer button, high-waisted deep red trousers.

Didn’t I hear you cry this morning
Didn’t I feel you weep
Teardrops flowing down on me / Life rivers in my sleep…

‘Justine.’

Her head whipped round and light caught at the crimson flecks in her near eye. Watched him silently until her partner whirled her around in a blur.

•Justine.’

‘What’a’you want, man? Don’t hassle my chick, hey. Keep cool, okay?’

Didn’t I hear your voice this morning / Didn’t you call my name
heard you whisper softly / But the words were never plain…

‘Justine. Look at me.’ He reached out.

‘Hey, man. Hey, hey. No way to act. You ain’t listening’. Drift away now. She don’t want no part o’ you.’

Noted in passing, the dilated pupils, the reddened nostrils.

‘Why don’t you go to the men’s room and do some blow?’

That’s a strange way to tell me you love me / When your sorrow is all I can see
/ you just want to cry to somebody / Don’t cry to me…

‘Now, hey man. I’m through talkin’ to you.’ The click^ unheard in the throbbing of the leather room but the gleam of the switchblade was unmistakable.

‘Justine.’

‘Don’t talk to her, man.’ One shoulder lowered. ‘Now this’s for you.’

He was very fast and he knew how to use it, trained in the street where there are no rules except the need to survive. This kind could be far more dangerous than the professional because of the unpredictability. The eight-inch blade could rip open his abdomen in a fraction of a second.

Blocked the initial thrust with his left forearm and, pivoting, slammed the edge of his right hand into the Puerto Rican’s pelvis. There was no sound save for the music; their violent motions, dancers’ movements assimilated into the fierce kineticism of the leather room.

The Puerto Rican’s mouth opened wide, his head thrown back in precisely the pose of the man in Munch’s The Scream. He moved to right himself and Nicholas jammed his shoe against the outer edge of the other’s right instep. All balance fled him and he pitched sideways, between two startled couples. His out flung arm smashed someone in the face as she whirled by.

It all might have been a scene from a comic opera but Nicholas did not feel like laughing.

Here are we / One magical moment / Subject the stuff from where dreams are women…

Justine looked from him to the fallen man, clutching his hip. The switchblade lay on the mottled floor like a centerpiece at a bizarre wedding which no one seemed to want to pick up and take home.

‘Justine -‘

‘How did you find me? What do you want from me?’

‘Justine.’

‘I can’t take any more. Please, please, please. Can’t you see I’ve been crying-‘

There are you / Drive life a demon / From station to station…

‘- over you. Over you.’

‘Justine. I came here -‘

‘And I don’t care any more if you know it.’

‘- to tell you I love you.”

Tears rolled silently from her eyes. The air was as thick as honey with music: aching voices, insinuating rhythms, erotic percussion. ‘Please.’ Had she heard him?

‘I love you.’ They touched in a kind of radiation of energy and misspent emotion. ‘Justine, I -‘

It’s not the side effects of the cocaine / I’m thinking that it must be love
It’s too late to be grateful
It’s too late to be late again I It’s too late to be hateful / It’s too late … f It’s too late…

‘… cried in the sand in front of your house with this night / And the sea and that’s never happened to me before.’ And he thought, lying on the long pale sea-foam sofa with Justine’s long warm body next to his: You’re wrong, Croaker. I can feel. I do feel.

‘Don’t be ashamed of it.’

‘I’m not.’ The first faint crumbling of his past, sliding downwards to be buried at last beneath the churning waves of the sea. ‘I wouldn’t have told you otherwise.”

‘It makes me happy.’ She put her fingers on his hip as if searching for a lock to open; ‘To know that you can be grateful to me for something.’ Stockinged, her legs whispered one against the other like cicadas’ wings. ‘The way I am grateful to you.’

‘It’s a new feeling.’ She watched his eyes turning inward, listening to his words. ‘What I did to you was so cruel. But I did it - I did it out of self-defence; a kind of survival instinct. I suddenly felt how close you had come to the core of me and it reminded me-‘

Her long hair brushed his shoulder. ‘Of what?’

“The sea, a long time ago; the mist and a ferry ride through a cyclorama of Japan.’ His lips stayed half open even when he was silent, tidal breathing as one does when dreaming. ‘It reminded me of a girl I once loved. The trouble was then, I thought I was still in love with her.’

‘Where is she now?’

‘I don’t know. She could be anywhere - anywhere.’ She could feel the rise and fall of his chest and abdomen, as regular as the tide. ‘She told ‘me she loved me - she convinced me - I didn’t know anyone could be that good at deceit…’

She smiled, half hidden in the dark. ‘If you’d been a woman, you’d know all right.’

‘Sometimes I think sex is for the animals.’

It was quiet for some time, just the intermittent hiss of late-night traffic passing outside, remote and inconsequential. Justine was surprised more by his tone; she had never before heard such bitterness and she found herself wondering just what had transpired between him and that girl so long ago.