The Man Who Fought Alone

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  I closed my own for a minute, rested my head on the back of the couch. By now I could tell that my ribs weren’t broken. Unconvincingly I muttered, “I didn’t expect to find you up. Is anything, wrong?”

  “Brew, you look terrible.” She sounded like she’d gone into another room. Or maybe my hearing had turned fuzzy. Before I could think of a snappy retort, she added, “But in a good way.”

  I lifted my head to stare at her. If she were poking fun at me—She looked serious, however. She even said, “I’m serious,” as if I’d accused her of insulting me. “I’ve seen you look terrible before. This is different.”

  I blinked, gaping like she’d lapsed into glossolalia. But the straight focus of her gaze didn’t waver, and after a while I leaned back again. She could see something that eluded me, so I decided to ignore it.

  “I took a beating tonight,” I told her. “My own damn fault. I made about three too many bad decisions in a row.”

  “And?” she inquired carefully.

  “And nothing. I got what I deserved.”

  Maybe she’d discovered intuition in my absence. Instead of demanding an explanation, she dropped the subject. With no change in her tone, she remarked, “I was hoping we could talk tonight.”

  “Why?” She had Marshal, didn’t she? Why did she want to talk to me?

  “I’m used to working with you,” she said as if I’d responded reasonably. “You help me think. Marshal gave me a case, and I can’t make sense out of it.”

  This time I didn’t gape at her. Tentatively I lowered my head to the arm of the couch, then gritted my confusion long enough to drag my feet off the floor and stretch out my legs. But even in that position I didn’t have enough support to sustain me.

  Marshal had given her a case—and she wanted me to help her think?

  While various hurts quarreled in my chest, I tried to understand myself. Somewhere deep inside—so deep that ordinarily I could pretend that it didn’t exist—I ached to talk to her myself. Did I help her think? I knew exactly what that was like.

  If she wanted to bridge the rift between us, the least I could do was let her try.

  “I’m not really all here,” I admitted. “I hurt too much. But I’ll give it a shot. Maybe I’ll come up with something.”

  “Good.”

  I received the distinct impression that she leaned forward sharply in her chair—that she was eager or anxious in ways that didn’t have much to do with her case—but I didn’t turn my head toward her. In fact, I kept my eyes shut so that I wouldn’t catch even a glimpse of her. If I let the look on her face distract me, I might not hear what she said.

  “Professional Investigations,” she began, “has a client named Mai Sternway,” and my heart sank so fast that I hardly heard what came next. “She hired us to protect her from her husband, Anson.”

  That unconscionable bastard, I thought—meaning Marshal. He hadn’t sent me to Bernie by chance. Or out of undifferentiated goodwill. And it was no accident that he’d been so helpful since. He’d set me up because he wanted me to feed him dirt about Sternway—he’d admitted that. But not for his own sake. He’d done it for Ginny.

  Without being obvious about it, he intended to maneuver us into working together.

  “They’re separated,” she was saying, “and she wants a divorce. But she’s been getting threatening phone calls. And that’s not all. Rocks have been thrown through her windows. Once her tires were slashed while she was out shopping. Buckets of shit have been smeared on her doors, front and back.”

  Damn it to hell. What kind of man assigned cases so that he could force his girlfriend to deal with her former partner?

  “Mai says her husband’s doing it,” she continued. “She claims he wants to scare her so she won’t demand what’s rightfully hers.

  “I’m supposed to protect her, but so far I haven’t been very effective.”

  A man who considered their partnership too valuable to lose.

  A man who didn’t think of her as his girlfriend.

  I wanted to howl, but my insides hurt too much.

  Unfortunately it was my turn to say something. For a moment I put my hands over my face to keep my eyes shut. Then I pulled them down again. I hardly knew what we were talking about.

  “The calls,” I ventured. “She recognizes his voice?”

  “No.” Ginny spoke as if we sat in the dark together—carefully, distinctly, unsure of the distance between us. “He’s muffled his voice somehow. But she’s sure it’s him.”

  “And you believe her?”

  “I answer her phone when I’m with her. Those are definitely threatening calls. Sometimes they’re obscene. The voice is muffled, but it’s male. She played me a tape he left behind. One of those pocket recorders, just reminders to himself. I can’t tell if it’s the same voice.”

  That wasn’t what I’d asked, but I let it pass temporarily.

  “I assume you’ve covered all the obvious stuff.” I could go that far without understanding the conversation. “Caller ID. Traces. ID blockers.”

  She may’ve nodded. I didn’t open my eyes to check.

  “He moves around. Most of the numbers have turned out to be pay phones. The rest are in bars and nightclubs. None of them belong to Sternway. Or his karate school. Or that organization he runs, the IAMA. An ID blocker shows up every once in a while. I don’t have the equipment to crack it.” She was referring to a piece of electronics that could hold a connection open long enough to trace even after the ID-blocked number hung up. “So far Marshal’s source at the phone company hasn’t reported any results.”

  Striving to focus past a chest full of old grievances, I asked unnecessarily, “Sternway doesn’t have a blocker on his home phone?”

  “If he does,” she stated, “he only turns it on when he’s harassing Mai.”

  Vaguely I wondered where he found the time. I’d have thought he was too busy to hassle anyone who wasn’t standing right in front of him.

  “How’s she taking it?”

  Ginny let some of her studious neutrality drop. “Mad as hell. That woman is a refined, cultivated harridan. She looks like one of those frail creatures who gets the vapors. She even dresses that way. A china doll too delicate to trim her own fingernails. But she doesn’t act like it.

  “She wants his blood, as much of it as she can get. And she has a scream that can bleed you dry at thirty yards. Of course, I don’t know what he’s like. But he must’ve had a death wish when he married her.

  “And by the way,” Ginny added, “Mai lives pretty high. I didn’t know karate honchos made the kind of money she spends. Unless one of them inherited bucks, they’ve both been in trouble for years.”

  By degrees I found myself starting to relax. As long as I kept my eyes shut and concentrated on Ginny’s voice, I could let Marshal Viviter and Turf Hardshorn drift away into the background. If I didn’t distract myself by sitting up—or arguing with her—I might be of some use after all.

  “If it means anything,” I offered through the phosphene dance inside my eyelids, “the people I’ve met around Sternway think that Mai wants to castrate him financially. Presumably that’s the story he tells.

  “But he’s”—I searched the dark for an adequate description—“complicated. I’ve seen quite a bit of him, especially today, but I can’t tell you if he’s the kind of asshole who bullies his wife. In the martial arts world, he’s Mr. Hell-on-Wheels. Impressive sonofabitch. The beating I got tonight—” I tried a shrug, but it hurt too much to complete. “It would’ve been worse,” a lot worse, “but he rescued me. Jumped in there and killed the clown who was trying to kill me.”

  Ginny might’ve reacted to that information, but I kept going.

  “On the other hand, you couldn’t call him a nice guy and feel comfortable. The way he talks, you’d think he sees everything in terms of money. Money and fighting. If he actually believes in anything—or cares about anybody—he keeps it to himself.”

  She cons
idered that for a moment. “None of which makes him an abusive husband,” she concluded.

  I nodded, just a slight shift of the muscles to show myself that I was still alive.

  What the fuck are you doing?

  If she’d been there in the alley, I would’ve asked her if I’d heard Hardshorn right. In my condition, I may’ve missed something. The clangor in my ears had confused the details.

  “You didn’t answer my question a minute ago,” I observed casually. “I get the impression you don’t believe Mai’s story.”

  Ginny snorted. “Most men would have a hard time living up to an image as black as the one she paints.” Then she admitted, “But it’s more than that. I’m not convinced he could do what she accuses him of without being in at least two places at once. She got calls this weekend while he was at that tournament, but none of the numbers were from The Luxury. And if he slashed her tires when she says he did, he got back to his school at about the speed of light. I checked.”

  For no particular reason, I asked, “She get any calls Saturday afternoon?”

  For an instant Ginny’s tone hardened. “You mean while I was at The Luxury?” She may’ve thought that I meant she’d been derelict to Mai when she’d come to check on me. “She says not.

  “Why?”

  I couldn’t tell her. I didn’t know. Intuition suggested the question. The rest of me just groped for patterns.

  “So you think she’s faking it,” I prompted.

  “I’m starting to.” Slowly Ginny’s voice unclenched. “I’m not there twenty-four hours a day. For all I know, she threw the rocks and dumped the shit herself. And she could hire the phone calls. I’m starting to wonder if she retained Professional Investigations to help her make Anson look bad, corroborate her story, so she can crucify him in the divorce.

  “I can’t see how the pieces fit any other way.”

  Without thinking about it, I said, “If the calls don’t stop now, you’re probably right.”

  Her silence sounded like, Huh? so I went on, “I don’t know how smart Sternway is, but I’ll bet he’s pretty clever. Like I said, I’ve been around him a lot.

  “And I’m there because Marshal recommended me. Sternway knows that, of course. He can assume that I talk to Marshal. Also he probably knows that Mai hired Professional Investigations. Marshal could confirm some of her accusations by checking with me.

  “Presumably Sternway can’t know I share an apartment with Mai’s protection. But he doesn’t have to be Heisenberg to realize that I could be a danger to him.

  “If he’s making the calls, he’ll stop now. He’ll want me for an alibi.”

  “So if the calls keep coming,” Ginny finished for me, “they aren’t from him.”

  I didn’t try another nod. While I could still talk without thinking, I said, “If I were you, I’d search her house. Sometime when she isn’t there. Really dig into it.”

  Right away, I felt her bristle. I could read her with my eyes closed. She sat eight feet away, but the nerves in my skin were sensitive to her abrupt ire.

  “What in hell for? You don’t think maybe that violates our client-investigator relationship?”

  More ethical questions. “Sure it does.” What else was I going to say? “But you might find something interesting.”

  Prying wasn’t actually unethical. It was her job. Ethics only came into it if she learned something that affected her decisions.

  Besides, she’d never hesitated to research her own clients before.

  But apparently she didn’t see it that way this time. “Like what?” she demanded.

  Suddenly I was angry. Too much lurked beneath the surface, waiting for one of us to make a mistake. It wore me out.

  “Ginny,” I sighed, “if I knew that, I wouldn’t be lying here like this. I’d be fucking prescient, and goons like Turf Hardshorn wouldn’t lay a hand on me.”

  “‘Turf Hardshorn’?” she echoed. “‘Turf’?”

  I didn’t stop. “If you think she hired someone to make those calls, maybe you can find out who. Hell, even crazy people fill out their checkbook registers. Or maybe she keeps buckets of shit hidden away somewhere, just in case. I don’t know.

  “You said you wanted to talk to me. If I had a better suggestion, I’d say so.”

  For a minute she didn’t respond. A couple of cars went by outside, muffled and fuming. My pulse yearned in my chest.

  Then she muttered, “Damn it, Brew, I hate it when you do that.”

  I heard a familiar exasperation in her voice, the kind that meant she wasn’t seriously angry. Not at me, anyway.

  “Do what?” I countered.

  “Make those leaps. I can’t follow them. And you’re right way too often. Half the time when you’re around I feel like I’ve had a lobotomy without noticing it.”

  All at once the pressure in the room evaporated. I had the giddy sensation that someone had lifted a set of free weights off me. Despite our difficulties, she was by God trying to get along with me.

  I felt so relieved that I about lost consciousness.

  For a while I didn’t say anything. Instead of trying to make sense out of her, I concentrated on letting my aches and disappointments recede into the couch. With my eyes closed, I could almost imagine what it might feel like to be at peace.

  But Ginny wasn’t done. When she’d chewed her exasperation small enough to swallow, she said in the same careful tone she’d used earlier, “So tell me. How does it happen that you’re spending so much time with Anson Sternway?”

  I knew what she had in mind as soon as she said the words. Bridging a rift like ours wasn’t something that you could tackle on just one side. You had to work for the middle from both ends. She’d made a start. Now she was asking me to do my part.

  And I wanted to respond. I’d been wanting her to back me up for hours now.

  Probably I should’ve told her about Bernie. That was what mattered to me most. And if nothing else it would explain how I got myself beat up. But I couldn’t. Somehow the way Alyse Appelwait had looked at me prevented it. Between us there was nothing at stake except how I felt about her husband.

  Nevertheless Ginny had opened a door for me, and I didn’t mean to let it swing shut.

  “It’s like this,” I began. “After the tournament, a developer named Alex Lacone hired me to improve security for his current project, a development he calls Martial America. It’s a karate complex—he’s got four schools so far, and he’s trying for more. Sternway’s his martial arts consultant.

  “The problem is those chops, the antiques at the tournament.” Belatedly it occurred to me that Marshal might not have told Ginny anything about my job. After all, he hadn’t revealed much about hers to me. “They’re either priceless or just valuable, depending on whether or not they’re genuine.”

  Too drained to go into detail, I gave her a brief background sketch of the chops, the tournament, and Lacone’s insurance dilemma. Then I explained, “The chops haven’t been authenticated yet. That’s supposed to happen soon. The insurance company has a local expert in mind to appraise them.”

  Wearily I added, “I’ve already spent enough time at Martial America to know that Lacone’s security stinks. Sternway gave me the tour this afternoon.”

  My sense of fatigue grew. And the more I said, the worse it became. For some reason, answering Ginny’s question was harder than it had any right to be. Instead of continuing, I wanted to concentrate on my pains and confusion until they seemed big enough to excuse my failure to match her.

  Probably I would’ve felt safer that way. Hadn’t I spent most of our years together convincing myself that I couldn’t hold up my end? I’d liked calling her my partner, but actually she’d been my boss. The one who made the decisions, took the responsibility. Kept me on my feet.

  If I wanted a partner, I’d have to earn one.

  Deliberately I opened my eyes and took a good look at the ceiling. When I’d located—or imagined—a small collection of spider
webs that I’d missed in my various cleaning frenzies, I leaned my bulk off the couch, braced myself, and stood up.

  “Brew—?” Uncertainty and concern complicated Ginny’s gaze. The tension in her arms and shoulders made her look like she wanted to come help me stand. The effort of restraining herself sent slivers of reflection off the curve of her claw.

  “I’ll be right back.” I intended my expression to be reassuring, but it didn’t feel that way.

  Stiffly I lumbered past her to the kitchen, where I moistened a couple of paper towels and picked up a broom. Then, rather like a sailboat navigating against too much wind, I tacked and hauled my way back into the living room.

  “But security isn’t the real issue,” I resumed. “Lacone will install obvious things like better locks and alarms as soon as the insurance company insists on them.” I hardly sounded audible to myself, but Ginny looked like she could hear me. “And whether or not the chops are genuine is secondary right now. The actual problem is that the chops are hot.”

  With a bit more effort than the job should’ve entailed, I draped the paper towels over the end of the broom. While Ginny stared, I angled toward the corner where I’d seen the spider webs.

  “Hot as in stolen,” I explained. “And emotionally hot. One of the schools is Chinese. Their sifu considers the chops a national treasure, ripped off in a kind of cultural rape. He’s practically quivering with outrage because right now the chops belong to a Japanese sensei in the same building.

  “Both schools seem to think those chops are about honor—personal, stylistic, national. And Sternway tells me that martial arts schools have a tradition of solving problems by beating the shit out of each other. Reclaiming their honor by main force.”

  In spite of my ribs, I stabbed damp towels at the offending webs. Sir Axbrewder in his armor, jousting with the Black Knight of Imperfect Cleanliness.

  “On top of which”—in retribution, my bruises made me groan—“he talks like another school in the same building can’t tell the difference between honor and ego. They’re outraged because the chops give more ‘face’ than they’ve got. Sternway has spent hours trying to warn me about the likelihood of a three-way explosion—although he can’t say it in so many words because Lacone pays him to promote Martial America.”