The Key to Midnight (10 page)

“But I don’t see how that applies to me. We’ve only had one date, an innocent lunch together.”

Mariko nodded solemnly. “But she’s fallen for you. Fast.”

“No. You’re wrong about that.”

“Just before you came on the scene, she was deeply depressed.”

“She didn’t seem that way to me.”

“That’s what I mean. You had an instant effect on her. She’s always in bad shape for a few weeks or even months after she drops someone she cares for, but recently she’d reached new lows. She felt so alone, lost. You lifted her spirits overnight.”

“If she’s really so lonely... why does she keep destroying every relationship?”

“She never wants to. But she seems compelled to shatter every hope of companionship.”

“Has she tried therapy?”

Mariko frowned. “My uncle’s a fine psychologist. I’ve urged her to see him about this and the nightmare, but she refuses. I worry about her all the time. At its deepest and blackest, her depression is contagious. It infects me at times, a little. If she didn’t need me and if I didn’t care for her so much, like my own sister, I’d have left long ago. She needs to share her life with friends, a partner. The last few months she’s pushed people away harder than usual, even me to some extent. In fact, it’s been so bad I’d just about decided to get out no matter what—and then you came along. Her immediate reaction to you was... Well, this time it seemed as if she might overcome her fear and form something permanent.”

Alex shifted on the bar stool. “Mariko-san, you’re making me uneasy. You’re seeing a lot more in this relationship than there really is. She doesn’t love me, for heaven’s sake. Love doesn’t happen this fast.”

“Don’t you believe in love at first sight?”

“That’s a poet’s conceit.”

“I think it can happen,” she demurred.

“Good luck. Fact is, I don’t think I believe in love at all, much less in love at first sight.”

She regarded him with amazement. “Not believe in love? Then what do you call it when a man and woman—”

“I call it lust—”

“Not just that.”

“—and affection, mutual dependence, sometimes even temporary insanity.”

“That’s all you’ve ever felt? I don’t believe it.”

He shrugged. “It’s true.”

“Love is the only thing we can depend on in this world. To deny that it exists—”

“Love is the
last
thing we can depend on. People say they’re in love. But it never lasts. The only constants are death and taxes.”

“Some men don’t work,” Mariko said, “therefore, they pay no taxes. And there are many wise men who believe in life everlasting.”

He opened his mouth to argue but grinned instead. “I have a hunch you’re a natural-born debater. I’d better stop while I’m only slightly behind.”

“What about Joanna?” she asked. “Don’t you care for her?”

“Yes, of course, I do.”

“But you don’t believe in love.”

“I
like
Joanna enormously. But as for love—”

Mariko raised one hand to silence him. “I’m sorry. This is rude of me. You’ve no reason to reveal so much of yourself.”

“If I didn’t want to talk, you couldn’t pry a word out of me.”

“I just wanted you to know that regardless of what you feel for her, Joanna is drawn to you. Strongly. Perhaps it’s even love. That’s why she rejected you so bluntly—because she’s afraid of such a deep commitment.”

As Mariko drank the last of her whiskey and got up to leave, Alex said, “Wait. I’ve got to see her.”

“Why?”

“Because... I’ve got to.”

“Lust, I suppose.”

“Maybe.”

“Not love, of course.”

He said nothing.

“Because you don’t believe in love,” she said.

He nodded.

Mariko smiled knowingly.

Alex didn’t want to explain about Lisa Chelgrin, so he let Mariko think that, after all, he felt more for Joanna than he was willing to admit. “It’s important, Mariko-san.”

“Come back tomorrow night. Joanna can’t take off work forever.”

“Won’t you just go upstairs now and persuade her to see me?”

“It wouldn’t help. She’s at her worst just after she’s broken off with someone. When she’s in this mood, she won’t listen to me or anyone.”

“I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“She’ll be cold to you.”

He smiled weakly. “I’ll charm her.”

“Other good men have given up.”

“I won’t.”

Mariko put one hand on his arm. “Pursue her, Alex-san. I think you need her every bit as much as she needs you.”

She walked away from him and disappeared through the door marked PRIVATE.

For a while after she left, Alex stared at himself in the blue mirror behind the bar.

The Moonglow orchestra played dance music. A Glenn Miller tune. The legendary Miller was long dead. Lost in a mysterious plane crash in World War II. His body had never been found.

Sometimes people vanish. The world goes on.

Alex was surprised by his reaction to Joanna’s rejection. He had the irrational urge to punch someone, anyone, and to pitch his whiskey glass at the bar mirror.

He restrained himself but only because surrender to the urge would be an admission of how powerfully this woman affected him. He’d always thought that he was immune to the sickness of romance. Now he was uneasy about his response to her—and as yet unwilling to think seriously about it.

He ate a light dinner at the Moonglow and left before the orchestra had finished its first set of the evening. The brassy, bouncy music—“A String of Pearls”—followed him into the street.

The sun had abandoned Kyoto. The city gave forth its own cold, electric illumination. With the arrival of darkness, the temperature had plummeted below freezing. Fat snowflakes circled lazily through the light from windows, open doors, neon signs, and passing cars, but they melted upon contact with the pavement, where the same lights were reflected in a skin of icy water.

Instead of putting on his topcoat, Alex draped it capelike over his shoulders. He could foresee several circumstances in which he might wish to be quickly free of such a bulky, encumbering garment.

Standing outside the Moonglow Lounge, he looked around as if deciding where to go next. In seconds, he spotted one of the three men who had appeared to be following him earlier in the evening.

The gaunt, middle-aged Japanese with a narrow face and prominent cheekbones waited thirty yards away, in front of a neon-emblazoned nightclub called Serene Dragon. Coat collar turned up, shoulders hunched against the wintry wind, he tried to blend with the pleasure-seekers streaming through the Gion, but his furtive manner made him conspicuous.

Smiling, pretending to be unaware of being watched, Alex considered the possibilities. He could take an uneventful stroll to the Kyoto Hotel, return to his suite, and go to bed for the night—still buzzing with energy, tied in knots of frustration, and none the wiser about the people behind the Chelgrin kidnapping. Or he could have some fun with the man who had him under surveillance.

The choice was easy.

Whistling happily, Alex walked deeper into the glittering Gion. After five minutes, having changed streets twice, he glanced behind and saw the operative following at a discreet distance.

In spite of the rising wind and shatters of snowflakes, the streets were still busy. Sometimes the nightlife in Kyoto seemed too frantic for Japan—perhaps because it was squeezed into fewer hours than in Tokyo and most Western cities. The nightclubs opened in late afternoon and usually closed by eleven-thirty. The two million residents of Kyoto had the provincial habit of going to bed before midnight. Already, by their schedule, half the night was gone, and they were in a rush to enjoy themselves.

Alex was fascinated by the Gion: a complex maze of streets, alleys, winding passages, and covered footpaths, all crowded with nightclubs, bars, craft shops, short-time hotels, sedate inns, restaurants, public baths, temples, movie theaters, shrines, snack shops, geisha houses. The larger streets were noisy, exciting, garish, ablaze with rainbow neon that was reflected and refracted in acres of glass, polished steel, and plastic. Here, the wholesale adoption of the worst elements of Western style proved that not all of the Japanese possessed the good taste and highly refined sense of design for which the country was noted. In many alley-ways and cobbled lanes, however, a more appealing Gion flourished. Off major thoroughfares, pockets of traditional architecture survived: houses that still served as homes, as well as old-style houses that had been transformed into expensive spas, restaurants, bars, or intimate cabarets; and all shared the time-honored construction of satiny, weather-smoothed woods and polished stones and heavy bronze or ironwork.

Alex walked the backstreets, thinking furiously, searching for an opportunity to play turnabout with the man who was tailing him.

The tail also assumed the role of a tourist. He did his phony window-shopping half a block behind Alex and, amusingly, in perfect harmony with him.

Of course, the guy might be more than merely a hired shadow. If Joanna was really Senator Tom Chelgrin’s daughter, the stakes in this mysterious game were likely to be so high that the rules might allow murder.

Finally, seeking respite from the chill wind, Alex went into a bar and ordered sake. He drank several small cups of the hot brew, and when he went outside again, the gaunt man was waiting, a shadow among shadows, twenty yards away.

Fewer people were on the street than when Alex had gone into the bar, but the Gion was still far too busy for the stranger to risk an assault—if, in fact, his mission was to do anything more than conduct surveillance. The Japanese people were generally not as apathetic about crime as were most Americans. They respected tradition, stability, order, and the law. Most would attempt to apprehend a man who committed a crime in public.

Alex went into a beverage shop and bought a bottle of Awamori, an Okinawa sweet-potato brandy that was smooth and delicious to the Japanese palate but coarse and acrid by Western standards. He wasn’t concerned about the taste, because he didn’t intend to drink it.

When Alex came out of the shop, the gaunt man was standing fifty or sixty feet to the north, at a jewelry-store window. He didn’t look up, but when Alex headed south, the hired shadow drifted after him.

Alex turned right at the first crossroads and ventured into a lane that was only open to pedestrians. The beauty of the old buildings was tainted by only a small amount of neon: Fewer than a dozen signs shone in the snowy night, and all were much smaller than the flashing monstrosities elsewhere in the Gion. Spirals of snow spun around half-century-old, globe-type street lamps. He passed a shrine that was flanked by cocktail lounges and bathed in dim yellow light, where worshipers practiced ancient central Asian temple dances to the accompaniment of finger bells and eerie string music. People were walking in that block too; though considerably fewer than in the lane that he’d just left, they were still numerous enough to discourage murder or even assault.

With the stranger tagging along, Alex tried other branches of the maze. He progressed from commercial blocks to areas that were half residential. The gaunt man became increasingly conspicuous in the thinning crowd and fell back more than thirty yards.

Eventually Alex found a quiet, deserted lane that fronted single-family homes and apartments. The only lights were those above the doors of the houses: accordionlike paper lanterns, waterproofed with oil and suspended on electric cords. The lanterns swung in the wind, and macabre shadows capered demonically across the snow-wet cobblestones.

The next alleyway was precisely what he needed: a six-foot-wide, brick-paved serviceway. On both sides, the backs of houses faced the passage. The first block featured three lights, one at each end and one in the middle. Among shadows that pooled between the alleyway lamps, there were groups of trash barrels and a few bicycles tethered to fences, but no people were anywhere to be seen.

Alex hurried into the alley, pulling off his topcoat as he went. Holding the coat, and with the bottle of Awamori gripped firmly in his right hand, he broke into a run. His shoes slipped on the damp bricks, but he didn’t fall. His heart pounded as he sprinted out of the light into the first long patch of darkness, ran under the midpoint lamp, and dashed into another stretch of deep gloom. His breath exploded in bursts of steam, and his injured arm bumped painfully against his side. When he reached the well-illuminated circle of brick pavement beneath the third and final street lamp, he stopped and turned and looked back.

The gaunt man was not yet in sight.

Alex dropped his topcoat in the center of the puddle of light. He hurried back the way he had come, but only ten or fifteen feet, until he was out of the reach of the street lamp and in the embrace of darkness once more.

He was still alone.

He quickly slipped behind a row of five enormous trash barrels and hunkered down. From the space between the barrels and the back wall of the house, he had an unobstructed view of the intersection where the gaunt man would soon appear.

Footsteps. Sound carried well in the cold air.

Alex strove to quiet his own ragged breathing.

The stranger entered the far end of the serviceway and stopped abruptly, surprised by the disappearance of his prey.

In spite of the apprehension that had pulled him as taut as a drumhead, Alex smiled.

The stranger stood without moving, without making a sound.

Come on, you bastard.

Finally the man approached along the serviceway. Warier than he had been a minute ago, he moved as lightly as a cat, making no noise to betray himself.

Alex cupped one hand over his mouth, directing the crystallized plumes of his breath toward the ground, hoping they would dissipate before they could rise like ghosts in the darkness and possibly betray his position.