by André Caroff
“Akamatsu lit a Shinsei cigarette, eyed his partner through the flame of the match and finally asked, “What are you afraid of?”
“Her recklessness! Since the death of her family she thinks about nothing but revenge. It’s turned into an obsession, a neurosis! That’s why May never for a minute believed in the disappearance of Madame Atomos. For the last six months she’s been preparing herself morally and physically for the return of the woman who destroyed her life. Now May Maxwell is nothing like the nice little middle class housewife that you knew in Dallas. If I really wanted you to understand what I mean, I’d say she was like a cannonball ready to be fired.”
Akamatsu tapped the ash off his cigarette into the ashtray. “A cannonball,” he said coldly, “can do nothing against Madame Atomos’ science. Past experience has proven that cunning is our only weapon. If the United States has not yet been reduced to ashes, it’s only because we managed, twice, to destroy the facilities of our enemy. By charging in like a bull, May Maxwell can do nothing but get herself killed.”
The Boss drummed his desk nervously. “Forgetting about any sentimentality, I won’t hide from you that fact that May’s death would be a hard blow to the already shaky prestige of the FBI. All the newspapers in the USA have told millions of readers the story of May Maxwell. Victim of her own imprudence, she became a national heroine. They went on about her indomitable courage and her spirit of sacrifice. My men and I looked like a bunch of boy scouts who couldn’t protect a woman, and even less so the country! Americans are starting to get scared, Yoshi. If our ineffectiveness became too visible, there’d be panic! And that’s exactly what we have to avoid since Madame Atomos is above all looking to terrorize the population! In the chaos she would be able to exterminate us with no resistance… Yes, Yoshi, letting May Maxwell join the team put an awesome responsibility on my back.”
Akamatsu got rid of his cigarette butt. There was no expression on his face and no emotion in his voice when he said, “It’s too late for regrets, sir. You can count on me. I will do my best to protect your new colleague. By the way, don’t you think that she should have been back by now? It seems to me that it doesn’t take that long to close your suitcase. May only asked for five minutes…”
The Boss frowned. “That’s right,” he admitted in a voice stabbed by worry. “May only had to cross the street. I let her have the bureau’s apartment that Soblen uses when he’s in New York. The windows are directly across from this office. I’ll have a look…”
He slid his chair out before standing up and at that very instant the window shattered, a bullet whistled by his ear and series of gunshots—Akamatsu counted eight of them—tore apart the relative silence. The Boss shook off the broken glass caught in his hair, stood up cautiously and saw Akamatsu still sitting in his chair. The calm he displayed made the Boss angry.
“That’s the only reaction you have!” he bellowed.
“You aren’t hurt, are you?”
“You could at least try to find out what happened!”
Akamatsu cracked a slight smile. “Someone shot at you. He was waiting in ambush in the apartment you were just talking about. May realized that the door had been forced open. She snuck in and saw the shooter at the very moment when he let off his first shot and then she emptied her .38 into him.”
The Boss was dumbstruck and leaned over to look out the window at the apartment across from his office. May Maxwell waved her arms and gave him the thumb’s up to let him know that everything was okay. She went toward the back of the room and he lost sight of her.
“Well, I’ll be!” he turned around. “I think you were right, Yosho!”
A screaming siren echoed in the distance and then the telephone started ringing. The Boss snatched it up. “Hello!” he barked.
“May Maxwell here. Are you hurt?”
“No, but it was a close call. What happened?”
“When I got up to my floor I saw the door open. I went in with my gun in hand. A guy holding a rifle with a silencer had you in his sights. He had time to get off one shot before I brought him down. What should I do?”
“Who’s the killer?” the Boss asked.
“A Japanese guy named Abe Sasako. His green card says that he was born in Hiroshima in 1924… If you want my opinion…”
“I know,” the Boss interjected, “and I agree. Madame Atomos wants to send me to the other side. Come back here, May, and leave the corpse where it is.” He hung up, sat down and lit his pipe.
“If you hadn’t moved,” Akamatsu pointed out, “you’d be dead. The guy only missed you by a couple of inches. At that distance it’s a good shot.”
“Allow me not to applaud,” the Boss grumbled.
“Who is he?”
“A fellow countryman of yours. Born in 1924 in Hiroshima. Probably a henchman of the you-know-what mother! If she does like they do in Murder Inc., we’re not out of the woods yet.”
When the Boss spoke like this, it meant that he was beginning to see red. But his duties did not authorize him to lose his self-control. He pressed the button of his intercom, was immediately on line and as if taking up a conversation that had been interrupted asked, “So, where are we?”
“The city police have been kept back. We’ve recovered the body. May Maxwell is in the stairway. Our agents have searched the building, the street is blocked off and the bystanders who are Asian are being questioned. The usual procedures are taking their course. Orders?”
“No. Everything’s perfect. Just make sure the journalists are kept at a distance.”
“Okay, sir.”
The Boss cut off when May entered the office. The young lady was carrying a light suitcase and a raincoat was draped over her arm. She was a little pale and flopped into a chair.
“Things aren’t going well?” the Boss said ironically.
“That’s the first time that…”
“He was a killer. Still he didn’t deserve the whole magazine. Generally one bullet is enough. Here are your plane tickets for San Francisco. Two room are waiting for you at the Lindamar.”
Akamatsu and May got up.
“Call me when you’ve made contact with Smith Beffort,” the Boss said again. “Goodbye.”
The two agents left.
The Boss looked at the bullet hole in the wall; sweat beaded on his forehead. Suddenly seized by a delayed fear, he wondered if he was getting old… or if he, too, was going to crack up faced with Madame Atomos.
Chapter IV
Because of the time difference the plane from New York landed before midnight in the San Francisco Airport across from Lomita Park. The jet, which was supposed to land over the Bay in the same airport where Beffort and Soblen had been welcomed by Ritter, was detoured at the last minute because of technical problems so that Akamatsu and May were not surprised to find no one in the arrival area.
They hailed a cab and were driven to the Lindamar Hotel. Once there they found out that Beffort and Soblen were not in their rooms and that they had not been seen since they dropped off their suitcases. The two agents got set up in their own rooms and met back in the bar to have a drink.
“I think,” Yosho said, “that they won’t be long. Don’t you find things a little too calm here, May?”
“In the hotel?”
“Everywhere. Madame Atomos launched her first attack only a few miles from the city. That usually creates a certain tension among the people. But it’s like the area around here is sunk in a kind of lethargy.
May grimaced. “We’re in California and it’s past midnight. Whoever is still up is tired and moving in slow motion. I have to say that I myself am exhausted. The change of climate, I guess.”
Yosho did not answer. He was watching the barman who was moving around with maddening slowness. The man was still young, but looked unnaturally tired. At the other end of the room, the front desk clerk was dozing behind his desk. The doorman was standing up, leaning against the wall, looking bored and staring at nothing.
In
the belly of the hotel a water pipe started to gurgle. Hearing it, Akamatsu suddenly realized how quiet the building and the city were. He touched his colleague’s arm. She jumped and turned a hazy eye to him.
“Let’s get out of here,” the Japanese whispered. “I have the feeling that something serious is taking place.”
May had trouble talking. “What about?”
Akamatsu looked around dubiously. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Ever since we got off the plane nothing has gone as planned…”
“Beffort and Soblen were not necessarily supposed to meet us on the ground,” May said, “and besides, our plane was detoured.”
“It’s just that, well, since we’ve been here, they should have contacted us by phone. What time is it, May? My watch stopped…”
The young woman looked down and saw the two hands of her watch stuck on 12. “Mine, too. At midnight.”
“Strange… Our watches stopped at the same time, just when we entered the hotel. Come on, there’s a clock in the hall.”
They crossed the bar, saw that the clock was also stuck on midnight and tried the front desk clerk and doorman. The first did not have a watch, but the doorman’s also showed the ominous number 12. Akamatsu pretended that it was not particularly important and asked the doorman, “Is there ever any nightlife in San Francisco?”
The man moved his feet and stood up straight. He was falling asleep and had to force himself not to close his eyes. “Usually,” he answered in a distant voice, “the guests practically never stop coming and going. Tonight, they’re almost all in bed. That happens.”
It was clear that keeping up a conversation bored him. The Japanese did not insist, but dragged May to the sidewalk. “Look around,” he said, “and tell me if you’ve ever seen this.”
The street was completely deserted and not even the sound of a motor could be heard. The buildings around them were all dark. Only the pale halos of the street lamps lit the night with their diffuse glow. Two taxis were parked nearby. The Japanese thought that one of the drivers was the one who had brought them from the airport.
“It’s true,” May said a little late. “This city is weird…” She spoke with difficulty, without emotion, in a monotone that instantly alerted Akamatsu. He scrutinized her and thought she looked a little sick. Right afterward he told himself that it was not exactly that. May was not sick. No more, anyway, than the barman, the doorman or the front desk clerk. All of them were suffering from some strange, contagious disorder. A kind of lethargy, still in its early stage, but which would progress at blistering speed.
Without a watch Akamatsu could not be sure, but he guessed that it could not have been later than 1:30 a.m. Now, at midnight there was a little life on the streets and May Maxwell as well as the Lindamar personnel were perfectly fine. Since the strange disorder had reduced them to this comatose state in just over an hour, it was foreseeable that, if nothing new happened in the meantime, the situation could only get worse.
Akamatsu grabbed May, who was wobbling, and leaned over her. “I’m going to help you to your room,” he said. “I don’t think you can take a step on your own. What’s wrong with you, May?”
The young woman hung onto him and stared at him in a daze. “I... am awfully tired, Yosho. Take me to the hotel or else I’m going to fall asleep on the sidewalk.”
Akamatsu led her to the Lindamar. In the hall the doorman and the front desk clerk were sound asleep. They had collapsed into bizarre positions, as if they had not had the idea or the inclination to go lie down on a bed. Sleep had surprised them without them putting up a fight.
The special agent took the elevator up to the third floor, helped May lie down, left the room while the young woman was already asleep and went back down to the ground floor. Once there, he shook the doorman hard to check his level of consciousness, but he got nothing out of him but a grunt. He let him go and turned toward the front door when the lights suddenly went out. Taken by surprise, Akamatsu groped along in the pitch black for a minute and when his eyes got used to the darkness he could make out the faint light of the moon through the glass doors of the main entrance. He went out and found himself in the chilly night. Not even the streetlights or the lights of the two parked taxis were working.
So it was not a question of a breakdown in the area like he first thought—it was a total, sudden stop of all sources of electric energy! That was exactly the way Madame Atomos worked and Akamatsu knew it. His sinister fellow citizen had just launched one of her most demoniacal campaigns of terror!
All of a sudden Akamatsu was struck by an idea that he was surprised not to have had earlier: Why was he safe from the epidemic that afflicted May Maxwell and the Lindamar personnel? Taken aback, he searched in vain for a plausible answer to the question and then decided to take action. The last word there is a little bit exaggerated. Alone in a sleeping city, cut off from his colleagues, the man from the Tokkoka could wander the empty streets indefinitely without ever meeting up with an adversary.
Even though he was well aware of these preliminary facts, Akamatsu still walked toward the taxis. Just as he expected the drivers were sleeping and in no condition to drive. He pushed over the driver of the first car, slid behind the wheel and started the ignition. Nothing happened. Akamatsu figured that the opposite would have surprised him and he abandoned the vehicle.
On the sidewalk he thumbed through his address book in the light of a match. He found the address of the FBI headquarters but knew that without a map of San Francisco he would have little chance of getting there fast. Though a stranger to the country, Akamatsu could obviously assume that Mission Street was located somewhere near the Lindamar. Not quite sure of it, however, he was about to go back to the taxis in the hope of finding a map when a group of men suddenly turned the corner of the next street.
Some of the men were carrying old gas lanterns whose flames flickered making their shadows dance. Akamatsu counted ten of them. Six civilians and four uniformed policemen. “You there,” one of upholders of law and order ordered, “come over here and keep your hands where we can see them!”
Akamatsu approached under the threat of arms and said, “I’m part of the FBI. I was sent from New York to…”
“Shut up!” the officer cut him off rudely. “Search him, boys.”
The Japanese was lightened of his Colt Cobra in the dead of night. Then the one who seemed to be the leader examined his papers, his mission orders, the temporary appointment to the FBI and finally gave them all back to Akamatsu.
“Glad to see a G-man up on his feet,” he said. “You’re the first we’ve seen awake tonight.”
Akamatsu pocketed his papers, holstered his Colt and said, “How do you explain that the city is sleeping and all of you and me…”
The men broke out laughing and the policeman was proud to answer, “In San Francisco only colored people held out! All the Whites nodded off, my man!”
Akamatsu whistled through his teeth. Until then he had not realized that the ten men were all black.
“Tonight,” the policeman boasted, “no one is sleeping in the black neighborhood or the Chinese. It’s us colored people who have organized the patrols to protect the Whites. The Mayor, the chief of police and all the civil and military dignitaries can’t lift a finger. If it goes on like this we’re going to have to take their place!”
A few laughs burst out and Akamatsu suddenly felt uncomfortable. The men were still acting okay, but you could see a kind of wild joy in them. For the first time in the history of the USA, a large part of the colored citizens were more important than the white population, even though for the time being it was only a pretty limited degree of self-esteem—a victory of prestige. That would no doubt be enough for a while. But what would happen if things got worse?
Akamatsu was of the yellow race and was not reluctant to be assimilated to the Blacks in front of him. A man is a man, good or bad, no matter what the color of his skin. But in this particular case, these men had been the oppre
ssed and did not have to be forced to become rebels! Sometimes it does not take much to fuel the flames and by sparing the non-white population in this corner of California, Madame Atomos had just lit the match.
“What did you doctors say?” the Japanese asked nonchalantly.
The black policeman did not miss it. It implied that the replacements of the Whites had to cover all fields without exception. “I don’t know,” he snapped back. “My job is to keep the order and open fire on any possible looters. A regular doctor but a good one, right, G-man?”
Akamatsu turned 90 degrees very naturally. None of the men were watching for it, but the special agent now had his Colt Cobra in his hand. “Okay,” he drawled, “since you’re on duty, I’m requisitioning you…”
The man furrowed his brow. Yosho understood his dilemma and knew that it was time to take the reins that were flapping in the wind.
“You’re Japanese… foreigner,” the Black said.
Akamatsu was suddenly seized with a cold rage that ignored the number of his opponents. His Cobra shot out from under his vest and bit painfully into the black man’s belly. “I belong to the FBI!” he was nasty. “In an emergency I have the right to requisition anybody liable to help me in my task. If you don’t obey, considering the circumstances, I’ll slap you with insubordination.”
The policeman was clearly confused. He hemmed and hawed. “What more do you think you’ll get by requisitioning me? That’s not going to wake up the Whites!” A murmur of approval ran through the group.
“Your doctors can take care of that problem,” Akamatsu replied. “Our goal is to discover the lair of Madame Atomos. That’s where these rays that are paralyzing the city are coming from.”
One of the civilians stepped forward. “You can requisition the police, but not us! Madame Atomos spared our race and we are very grateful to her for that. Don’t believe for a second that we’re going to risk getting killed by defying her.”
Abruptly and because of this outburst, things that seemed to be working out went rotten.
