Tengu

by Graham Masterton

  Esmeralda had admired his well-polished fingernails, and then added, “My client needs somebody who can manage his interests in California. Someone to help him with organization and transportation; someone to fetch and carry. Someone sophisticated and unscrupulous. And that someone will be you.”

  Gerard had stood up and thrust his hands into his trouser pockets. “Mr. Esmeralda,” he said fiercely, “I want you to get out of my office.”

  “Of course you do.” Esmeralda had smiled, and his voice had been as oily and soothing as warm coconut milk. “But you’ve been running risks for years now, selling arms and drugs to whichever client will pay you the most money, and there always comes a time in lives like yours when chickens come home to roost. This is it, Mr. Crowley. This is when your chickens come home.”

  Gerard had slowly closed the door of his office, and then he and Esmeralda had talked in private for three hours. At the end of that time, Gerard had agreed, grudgingly but curiously, to supervise the day-to-day fetching and carrying that was going to be needed by the men who were running the program, and to liaise with whomever else Esmeralda might appoint to assist him. “I have already chosen an interpreter, a Japanese woman,” Esmeralda had informed him. “Also, a traffic-control expert, a retired naval commander. You will be in excellent company.”

  As he had adjusted his hat in front of the mirror in preparation for leaving, Esmeralda had added, “The super bodyguards will be called Tengus, after the Japanese word for powerful devils. You like that word, Tengus? They will be volunteers, each one of them... young Japanese men who are already physically fit and extremely strong. They know the risks of the drugs they will be taking, the steroids and so forth, and you will have to get used to the idea that some of them may become temporarily... well, unstable. My client’s experiments are still in their early days.”

  He had opened the door, so that Francesca could hear what he was saying. “I want you to know, Mr. Crowley that this program is worth millions of dollars–millions. You understand me? You will get your share when the time comes, but only if you do exactly what you are told to do, and behave .yourself. And there is one more thing.”

  “What’s that?” Gerard had asked him flatly, annoyed that he had opened the door.

  “You must know that the program has some enemies... people who look down on this kind of thing. Health officials, bleeding hearts. You know who I mean. After all, some of the drugs that my client will be using won’t exactly be... approved, if you understand me. So, there may be people who have to be warned off, decisively.”

  Gerard had opened his cigar box and taken out a fresh cigar. He knew exactly what “warned off, decisively,” meant. He was quite fluent in the euphemisms of smuggling and arms running. He took out a match, struck it, and looked at Esmeralda through the smoke and the flame. “All right,” he had said. “We’ll talk about that when the time comes.”

  Now, the time had come, and their attempt to “warn off” one of the program’s enemies had ended in chaos and complications. Francesca could sense the unease and tension in Gerard’s body, and she touched his forehead, stroked the backs of his hands, kissed him.

  “Money isn’t everything, Gerard,” she said.

  “I don’t think I’m involved with Esmeralda for the money,” Gerard told her. “In fact, I don’t know why I’m involved with Esmeralda at all.”

  Francesca said, with unexpected softness, “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “I’ve been hurt plenty of times,” he said, kissing her quickly. “Once more wouldn’t make any difference. Not that I intend to get hurt. I don’t intend to get anything but very much richer.”

  The telephone warbled. Gerard picked it up. He listened, but didn’t speak. Then he put the receiver down again.

  “Put something on,” he told Francesca. “Nancy Shir-anuka’s coming up.”

  Francesca took a pair of tight white corduroy jeans from the back of the bedroom chair and stepped into them. Then she buttoned a blood-red silk blouse over her bare breasts and ran her hands through her hair. She looked like a woman who had been making love for most of the afternoon. She smellcd of sex and Chanel.

  Gerard went into the living room and switched on the lamps. He called, “When you get through to room service, have them send up a couple of bottles of California chablis and some potato chips. Maybe some beer.”

  “When you entertain, you really go to town, don’t you?” she said sarcastically, tucking her blouse into her jeans.

  Gerard didn’t answer. He had opened the drawer in the writing desk, and he was looking inside as intently as if he had found the dead body of a poisonous spider in there. Lying among the Hotel Bonaventure writing paper and postcards was a .357 Python revolver.

  He didn’t touch the gun. He knew it was loaded. He just wanted to make sure it was still there.

  Quietly, he closed the drawer.

  “Is the commander coming up, too?” asked Francesca.

  The door chimes rang. Gerard said: “He’s staying out at the ranch for tonight. He’s arranging to get Yoshikazu over the border.’’

  He put his eye to the peephole in the door. Then he loosened the chain and opened it. Nancy Shiranuka stalked in, dressed in an olive-green safari shirt and slacks, and wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat. She took off her hat, tossed her long black hair, and looked around the suite disdainfully.

  “For two hundred a night, you think they’d give you some decent prints on the walls,” she said.

  “I don’t usually come here to look at the pictures,” Gerard told her. He said it without humor.

  “I know what you come here for,” said Nancy blandly. “But sex is art, and art is sex. If they put up one or two Sugimura prints of ten-year-old courtesans, don’t you think the room would look much better? And don’t you think it would be a more stimulating place to take your lady-love?”

  “Unfortunately, I don’t think Westin Hotels have any leeway in their decorating budget for rare Japanese pornography,” said Gcrard.

  Nancy sat down on the mock-antique sofa and elegantly crossed her legs. “Of course not. It’s the great Caucasian failing. Budgets before art, budgets before sex, budgets before anything.”

  Gerard said, “And what about the great Oriental failing?”

  His voice was quiet, but acidly sharp. Nancy sensed the change in tone.

  “Have you heard from Ernest?” she asked him. “I talked to Ernest an hour ago.”

  “Then he probably told you they’ve already disposed of the van.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” said Nancy edgily, “I don’t have much more to tell you.”

  “What did Doctor Gempaku say?” asked Gerard. “He was too busy when I called.”

  “He’s not very hopeful. The Tengu was shot by the police several times, and he’s still in a coma.”

  “What will Gempaku do if he can’t be revived?”

  Nancy opened her pocketbook and took out a green lacquered cigarette case. “The same as our noble employers do to anyone who doesn’t fit in happily with their business schemes, I suppose” she said.

  Gerard pursed his lips. He was angry, but controlled. He knew that most of what had happened had been ridiculous bad luck, and that Nancy wasn’t really to blame. But now there had been two foulups in two days, two serious and disabling setbacks, and even if the caper hadn’t been completely written off, it had certainly been delayed.

  Worse, it had shaken Gerard’s credibility, and with EsmeraJda breathing so closely down his neck, Gerard needed all the credibility he could muster. Working for Esmeralda was all bluff and double bluff, and living on your nerves.

  Gerard said, “I suppose Yoshikazu knows how much this has cost us.”

  “Of course he does. But it wasn’t his fault.”

  “He ran a red light right in front of a police car, and it wasn’t his fault?”

  “What else was he supposed to do?” Nancy demanded. “The Tengu was going mad. He couldn’t sit in t
raffic while the whole van was torn to pieces around him.” She lit her cigarette. Then she added, “Yoshikazu did very well. This has cost us, but it hasn’t cost us everything.”

  “Not unless the police trace the van. Not unless the customs people pick him up at the border. Not unless some smartass with a long memory puts six and seven together and comes up with unlucky thirteen.

  “I think you’re fretting too much about what your precious Mr. Esmeralda thinks of you,” said Nancy. “Don’t worry about him. You know the police won’t trace the van. You also know that Ernest will get Yoshikazu safely into Mexico.”

  “That’s two problems out of three,” put in Gerard. “But what about our friend Sennett? The one for whom that sad young starlet died in vain?”

  “That’s up to Esmeralda, not to me.”

  “He made it our responsibility,” Gerard insisted.

  “It’s not a responsibililty I want to accept.”

  “You’ll have to. If you don’t, this entire scheme is going to collapse like a half-cooked souffle.”

  “I didn’t accept this job to murder people,” snapped Nancy.

  “It’s too late for that, my dear. You’re an accessory already. And what did you think you were letting yourself in for, really, when Esmeralda told you he was building up a crack stable of killer bodyguards?”

  Nancy said, “I’m beginning to wonder if any of us is safe. If Esmeralda can order one man killed, why not another? Why not us? Why did he chose any of us in the first place? Because we are all magnificently unprincipled, and because we all have connections in the grubbiest places? Or because, if any of this business goes wrong, we can all be dropped quietly into the ocean without anybody making too much noise about it?”

  Gerard nodded. The cold smile was back on his lips. “My thoughts exactly,” he said.

  Francesca came into the room, her hair brushed and shining. “That wine’s taking its time,” she remarked.

  Gerard said, “They’re probably waiting for it to become a respectable vintage.”

  “Are you going out to the ranch yourself?” Francesca asked him. “In a couple of days. Once, I get all this administrative mess sorted out. And replace Yoshikazu.”

  “You could try Kemo,” suggested Nancy.

  “Kemo? Your houseboy?”

  “That’s right. He’s quick, he’s eager, and he’s got a good head on his shoulders.”

  ‘‘As long as he doesn’t object to having it knocked off.’’

  “He knows the risks.”

  Gerard pinched the bridge of his nose tiredly. He was beginning to feel that maybe he wasn’t as energetic as he had been two or three years ago. A whole afternoon of drinking and lovemaking was more than he could comfortably manage, especially if he wanted to stay alert during the evening. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll have a talk with him. Now, what other problems do you have for me?”

  “Only details. They spotted a couple of prowlers around the ranch yesterday afternoon, but they turned out to be hippies looking for a place to crash. Doctor Gempaku says he needs more power, perhaps another generator, and maybe you can arrange for a temporary stopgap. A mobile generator maybe.”

  “What’s he running out there?” Gerard demanded. “A sound-and-light show?”

  “He’s hoping to open the new center in six weeks. He has to do it, Gerard, or he’ll never meet the deadline.”

  “All right,” said Gerard. “I’ll get on it. Francesca?” Francesca made a scribbled note on the hotel pad, and pulled a tight, unhelpful expression which Gerard recognized as trouble.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Jerry and David ate breakfast together in silence; a cup of black coffee for Jerry and a bowl of Lucky Charms for David. On the radio, they were still talking about the white-masked copkiller, but by now the story had been chewed over by so many expert opinions and so much tough talk from the Hollywood police that it bore little resemblance to the violent event it had actually been.

  David was as rangy as his father; a long-legged, untidy boy of fourteen; but he had inherited, unmistakably, his mother’s forehead and eyes. Jerry could stare at him sometimes, when he was watching television or doing his math homework, and see Rhoda, exactly as she had been before the cancer had dulled and wasted her and at last taken her away.

  “That’s some weird murder,’ huh?” asked David. “Do you hear what they said? Some guy in a white mask swinging this cop around by the ankles.”

  “Sure,” said Jerry unenthusiastically. “Real weird.”

  David said, “You’re okay, aren’t you, Dad?”

  “What makes you ask that?”

  “I don’t know. You seem like you’re down.”

  Jerry shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know what it is. I just get the feeling there’s something strange going on. You know that feeling you get just before an electric storm? Kind of a tension.

  Like two magnets when you try to push them together and they resist each other.’’

  David finished his cereal, drained his glass of orange juice, and then went to the sink to wash his dishes. “Are you seeing Doctor Grunwald today?” he asked matter-of-factly. Dad’s continuing analysis was a part of daily life which he had grown to accept as quite normal; besides, half the kids in his class had parents undergoing psychiatric treatment. Kim Pepper’s mother had taken an overdose last month and nearly died. It was nearly as fashionable to attempt suicide as it was to Sierra-Stone your poolside. Jerry said, “Maybe. I mean, yes, I probably will.” David stood by the sink, in his T-shirt and faded Levi’s, and looked at his father with a mixture of sorrow and exasperation. “You don’t really need him, you know. You could manage on your own, if you tried.”

  Jerry gave his son a quick and vinegary smile. “Day-today living I can manage on my own. You I can manage on my own. The only thing I can’t manage on my own is Japan.”

  David was quiet for a long time, but then he said, “That all happened thirty-eight years ago, Dad.

  You know? Thirty-eight years.”

  “I know, David. But memories aren’t necessarily erased by passing years. Sometimes, they grow more relevant, sharper, more disturbing. And now there’s something in the air... this tension....

  It kind of reminds me of Japan. I don’t know why. But it has the same feeling of complete doom.”

  “Doom?” repeated David, with exaggerated wide-eyed emphasis. “Jesus, Dad, only comic strip characters say

  ‘doom’!”

  Jerry glanced up at David wryly. “Maybe that’s my real problem. Maybe, in reality, I’m a comic strip character. Jerry and the Pirates.”

  David said, “Never,” and gave his father a friendly cuff on the arm.

  Jerry drove David to school, dropping him outside the gates. Then he cruised slowly back home to Orchid Place, listening to Hilly Rose on KMPC 710 and thinking about Japan.

  Japan... and those hot still days in the Chugoku Sanchi, under a sky the color of melted lead, hidden deeply in a camouflaged crevice of the forest, with no sound but the chirruping of insects and the endless warbling of the radio. He pulled up at an intersection, and for a split second he didn’t know where he was. A garbage truck pulled up behind him and gave him a noisy blast on its horn to remind him that he was back in the present day. On the radio, Hilly Rose was talking to Sergeant Skrol-nik. “Is there anything apart from the white mask which connects these two murders? Any other clue whatsoever? I mean, are we dealing with a single murderer here, or a look alike?”

  Sergeant Skrolnik was on his best media behavior, and his voice sounded strangled. “The connections are many and varied. You understand what I mean. It’s not just the mask. The modus operandi is strikingly similar, in that both victims were wrenched apart by bare hands.

  No sign of any kind of blunt instrument, or weapon of any description. This is a job committed by somebody of almost superhuman strength.”

  “Somebody crazy, perhaps?” asked Hilly Rose. “Somebody with lunatic strength?”

>   “Lunatic strength is a myth,” said Skrolnik. “What we’re dealing with here is somebody who naturally and normally possesses unusual physical power; and that’s who we’re looking for.

  Somebody who trains day and night in karate, something like that. Maybe a bodybuilder.”

  “What about this white mask?”

  “We don’t have any clues about the mask so far... but a police artist has been reconstructing the mask based on the evidence supplied to us by witnesses who passed the homicide location on the Hollywood Freeway, and we hope to be able to show that mask on television tonight, in the hope that it’s going to jog somebody’s memory. All I can say about it so far is that it’s dead white, kind of expressionless... and probably varnished. One eyewitness said that it had some kind of pattern on it, on the forehead, but for tonight’s reconstruction we’re omitting that detail because nobody else saw it, and the witness admits that it might have been a fleck on his own windshield....”

  Jerry thought, White, expressionless.... There was something about the way in which Sergeant Skrolnik was trying to describe the murderer that made his stomach turn over, something which disturbed old memories.... We ‘ve located it, sir. No question about it. We ‘ve taken sixteen radio bearings and we have it right on the button. In that case, withdraw immediately. I repeat, immediately. You will be picked up at 2125 hours on the 15th on the beach at Kokubu.

  “Yes, sir,” Jerry whispered to himself, aloud, as he turned into the driveway of his home.

  He climbed out of the car. A young man in a sleeveless T-shirt and shorts was sitting on the wall, smoking and obviously waiting for him. The young man was blond and curly, and looked as if he spent most of his day down at the beach or sunning himself on a flat roof somewhere. Jerry said flatly, “Good morning. You looking for me?”

  “You’re Mr. Jerry Sennett?”

  “That’s right. Who wants to know?”

  “Mack Holt’s my name. I used to be Sherry’s boyfriend. Sherry Cantor? That was in the days before Our Family Jones. But we broke up when she got into that.”