The Key to Midnight (8 page)

Reluctantly he let go of her.

As she got out of the taxi, a blast of frigid air rushed past her and struck Alex in the face.

Joanna felt threatened.

She was overcome by the unshakable conviction that her every move was being watched and recorded.

She locked the door of her apartment. She went into the bedroom and latched that door as well.

For a minute she stood in the center of the room, listening. Then she poured a double brandy from a crystal decanter, drank it quickly, poured another shot, and put the snifter on the nightstand.

The room was too warm.

Stifling. Tropical.

She was sweating.

Each breath seemed to scorch her lungs.

She opened a window two inches to let in a cold draft, took off her clothes, and stretched out nude atop the silk bedspread.

Nevertheless, she still felt that she was smothering. Her pulse raced. She was dizzy. The room began to move around her as if the bed had become a slowly revolving carousel. She experienced a series of mild hallucinations too, none new to her, images that had been a part of other days and moods like the one that now gripped her. The ceiling appeared to descend between the walls, like the ceiling of an execution chamber in one of those corny old Tarzan movie serials. And the mattress, which she’d chosen for its firmness, suddenly softened to her touch, not in reality but in her mind: It became marshmallowy, gradually closing around her, relentlessly engulfing her, as though it were a living, amoeboid creature.

Imagination. Nothing to fear.

Gritting her teeth, fisting her hands, she strained to suppress all sensations that she knew to be false. But they were beyond her control.

She shut her eyes—but then opened them at once, suffocated and terrified by the brief self-imposed darkness.

She was dismayingly familiar with that peculiar state of mind, those emotions, that unfocused dread. She suffered the same terrors every time that she allowed a friendship to develop into more than a casual relationship, every time that she traveled beyond mere desire and approached the special intimacy of love. The panic attacks had just begun sooner this time, much sooner than usual. She desired Alex Hunter, but she didn’t love him. Not yet. She hadn’t known him long enough to feel more than strong affection. A bond was forming between them, however, and she sensed that their relationship would be special, that it would evolve far faster than usual—which was sufficient to trigger the anguish that had washed like a dark tide over her. And now events, people, inanimate objects, and the very air itself seemed to acquire evil purpose that was focused upon her. She felt a malevolent pressure, squeezing her from all sides, like a vast weight of water, as though she had sunk to the bottom of a deep sea. Already it was unbearable. The pressure would not relent until she turned forever from Alex Hunter and put behind her any danger of emotional intimacy. Intense fear lay dormant in her at all times; now it had been translated into a physical power that squeezed all hope out of her. She knew how it would have to end. She needed to break off the relationship that sparked her claustrophobia; only then would she obtain relief from the crushing, closed-in, listened-to, watched-over feeling that made her heart pound painfully against her ribs.

She would never see Alex Hunter again.

He would come to the Moonglow, of course. Tonight. Maybe other nights. He would sit through both performances.

Until the man left Kyoto, however, Joanna would not mingle with the audience between shows.

He’d telephone. She’d hang up.

If he came around to visit in the afternoon, she would be unavailable.

If he wrote to her, she would throw his letters in the trash without reading them.

Joanna could be cruel. She’d had plenty of experience with other men when simple attraction had threatened to develop into something deeper... and more dangerous.

The decision to freeze Alex out of her life had a markedly beneficial effect on her. Almost imperceptibly at first, but then more rapidly, the immobilizing fear diminished. The bedroom grew steadily cooler, and the sweat began to dry on her naked body. The humid air became less oppressive, breathable. The ceiling rose to its proper height, and the mattress beneath her grew firm once more.

The Kyoto Hotel, the largest first-class hotel in the city, was Western style in most regards, and the telephones in Alex’s suite featured beeping-flashing message indicators, which were signaling him when he returned from the eventful afternoon with Joanna Rand. He called the operator for messages, certain that Joanna had phoned during his trip from the Moonglow to the hotel.

But it wasn’t Joanna. The front desk was holding a fax for him. At his request a bellhop brought it to the suite.

Alex exchanged polite greetings and bows with the man, accepted the cable, tipped him, and went through the bowing again. When he was alone, he sat at the drawing-room desk and tore open the flimsy envelope. The message was from Ted Blankenship in Chicago, on Bonner-Hunter letterhead:

 
Courier arrives at your hotel noon Thursday, your time.

 
By noon tomorrow Alex would have the complete Chelgrin file, which had been closed for more than ten years but which definitely had now been reopened. In addition to hundreds of field-agent reports and meticulously transcribed interviews, the file contained several excellent photographs of Lisa that had been taken just days before she disappeared. Perhaps those pictures would shock Joanna out of her eerie detachment.

Alex thought of her as she had been when she’d gotten out of the taxi a short while ago, and he wondered why she’d so suddenly turned cold toward him. If she was Lisa Chelgrin, she didn’t seem to know it. Yet she acted like a woman with dangerous secrets and a sordid past to hide.

He suspected that amnesia was the explanation for her situation—perhaps the result of a head injury or even psychological trauma. Of course, amnesia didn’t explain where and why she had come up with an alternate past history.

He looked at his watch: 4:30.

At six-thirty he would take his nightly stroll through the bustling Gion district to the Moonglow Lounge for drinks and dinner—and for that important conversation with Joanna. He had time for a leisurely soak in the tub, and he looked forward to balancing the steamy heat with sips of cold beer.

After fetching an ice-cold bottle of Asahi from the softly humming bar refrigerator, he left the drawing room and went halfway across the bedroom before he stopped dead, aware that something was wrong. He surveyed his surroundings, tense, baffled. The chambermaid had straightened the pile of paperbacks, magazines, and newspapers on the dresser, and she’d remade the bed while he’d been gone. The drapes were open; he preferred to keep them drawn. What else? He couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary—and certainly nothing sinister. But something was wrong. Call it intuition: He’d experienced it before, and usually he’d found it worth heeding.

Alex set the bottle of Asahi on the vanity bench and approached the bathroom with caution. He put his left hand against the heavy swinging door, listened, heard nothing, hesitated, then pushed the door inward and stepped quickly across the threshold.

The late-afternoon sun pierced a frosted window high in one wall, and the bathroom glowed with golden light. He was alone.

This time his sixth sense had misled him. A false alarm. He felt slightly foolish.

He was jumpy. And no wonder. Although lunch with Joanna had been immensely enjoyable, the rest of the day had been a grinding emery wheel that had put a sharp edge on his nerves: her irrational flight from the Korean at Nijo Castle; her description of the oft-repeated nightmare; and his growing belief that the unexplained disappearance of Lisa Jean Chelgrin had been an event with powerful causes and effects, with layers of complex and mysterious meaning that went far deeper than anything that he had uncovered or even imagined at the time it had happened. He had a right to be jumpy.

Alex stripped off his shirt and put it in the laundry bag. He brought a magazine and the bottle of beer from the other room and put them on a low utility table that he had moved next to the bath. He bent down at the tub, turned on the water, adjusted the temperature.

In the bedroom again, he went to the walk-in closet to choose a suit for the evening. The door was ajar. As Alex pulled it open, a man leapt at him from the darkness beyond.
Dorobo.
A burglar. The guy was Japanese, short, stocky, muscular, very quick. He swung a fistful of wire shirt hangers. The bristling cluster of hooked ends struck Alex in the face, could have blinded him, and he cried out, but the hangers spared his sight, stung one cheek, and rained around him in a burst of dissonant music.

Counting on the element of surprise, the stranger tried to push past Alex to the bedroom door, but Alex clutched the guy’s jacket and spun him around. Unbalanced, they fell against the side of the bed, then to the floor, with the intruder on top.

Alex took a punch in the ribs, another, and a punch in the face. He wasn’t in a good position to use his own fists, but he heaved hard enough to pitch off his assailant.

The stranger rolled into the vanity bench and knocked it over. Cursing continuously in Japanese, he scrambled to his feet.

Still on the floor, dazed only for an instant, Alex seized the intruder’s ankle. The stocky man toppled to the floor, kicking as he fell. Alex howled as a kick caught his left elbow. Sharp pain crackled the length of his arm and brought a stinging flood of tears to his eyes.

The Japanese was on his feet again, moving through the open doorway, into the drawing room, toward the suite’s entrance foyer.

Blinking away the involuntary tears that blurred his vision, Alex got up, staggered to the doorway. In the drawing room, when he saw that he couldn’t reach the intruder in time to prevent him from getting to the hotel corridor, he plucked a vase from a decorative pedestal and threw it with anger and accuracy. The heavy ceramic exploded against the back of the
dorobo’s
skull, instantly dropping him to his knees, and Alex slipped past him to block the only exit.

They were breathing like long-distance runners.

Shaking his head, flicking shards of the vase from his broad shoulders, the
dorobo
got up. He glared at Alex and motioned for him to move away from the door. “Don’t be a hero,” he said in heavily accented English.

“What’re you doing here?” Alex demanded.

“Get out of my way.”

“What are you doing here? A
dorobo?
No. You’re more than just a cheap burglar, aren’t you?”

The stranger said nothing.

“It’s the Chelgrin case, isn’t it?”

“Move.”

“Who’s your boss?” Alex asked.

The intruder balled his chunky hands into formidable fists and advanced a single threatening step.

Alex refused to stand aside.

The
dorobo
withdrew a bone-handled switchblade from a jacket pocket. He touched a button on the handle, and faster than the eye could follow, a seven-inch blade popped into sight. “Move.”

Alex licked his lips. His mouth was dry. While he considered his alternatives—none appealing—he divided his attention between the man’s hard black eyes and the point of the blade.

Thinking he sensed fear and imminent surrender, the stranger waved the knife and smiled.

“It’s not going to be that easy,” Alex said.

“I can break you.”

At first glance, the intruder seemed soft, out of shape. On closer inspection, however, Alex realized that the guy was iron hard beneath the masking layer of fat. A sumo wrestler had the same look in the early days of training, before attaining his gross physique.

Brandishing the switchblade again, the intruder said, “Move.”

“Are you familiar with the English expression ‘Fuck you’?”

The stranger moved faster than any man Alex had ever seen, as fluid as a dancer in spite of his bulk. Alex clutched the thick wrist of the knife hand, but with the amazing dexterity of a magician, the
dorobo
tossed the weapon from one hand to the other—and struck. The cold blade sliced smoothly, lightly along the underside of Alex’s left arm, which still tingled from being kicked.

The stocky intruder stepped back as abruptly as he had attacked. “Gave you just a scratch, Mr. Hunter.”

The blade had skipped across the flesh: Two wounds glistened, thin and scarlet, the first about three inches long, the other marginally longer. Alex stared at the shallow cuts as if they had opened utterly without cause, miraculous stigmata. Blood oozed down his arm, trickled into his hand, dripped from his fingertips, but it didn’t spurt; no major artery or vein was violated, and the flow was stanchable.

He was badly shaken by the lightning-swift attack. It had happened so fast that he still hadn’t begun to feel any pain.

“Won’t require stitches,” the stranger said. “But if you make me cut again... no promises next time.”

“There won’t be a next time,” Alex said. He found it difficult to admit defeat, but he wasn’t a fool. “You’re too good.”

The intruder smiled like a malevolent Buddha. “Go across the room. Sit on the couch.”

Alex did as instructed, cradling his bloodied arm and thinking furiously, hoping to come up with a wonderful trick that would turn defeat into triumph. But he wasn’t a sorcerer. There was nothing he could do.

The burglar remained in the foyer until Alex was seated. Then he left, slamming the door behind him.

The instant he was alone, Alex sprinted to the telephone on the desk. He punched the single number for hotel security. He changed his mind, however, and hung up before anyone answered.

Hotel security would call in the police. He didn’t want the cops involved. Not yet. Maybe never.