Tengu

by Graham Masterton

  Worse still, the police would now be in possession of a wealth of circumstantial and forensic clues which could lead them, eventually, to an arrest. They were likely to be questioning the Japanese community already about unusual comings and goings among Japanese; and if Gerard Crowley had been even slightly careless in his dealings with the immigration authorities, they could pick him up within hours.

  He listened to the end of the bulletin, to see if there was any news about Admiral Thorson himself, but the announcer didn’t even mention him. That meant the old man was probably still alive; and if that was the case, Kappa’s fury would be devastating. Twice the Tengus had been sent out to kill, and twice they have failed. Mr. Esmeralda had warned Kappa again and again about employing unstable people like Gerard Crowley and Ernest Ouvarov, but Kappa had been adamant that their hirelings should not only be dispensable, but “tainted with the breath of evil.” Only men and women without any social or sexual morals would be able to undertake the greatest task of all, the task for which the Tengus had been created from the beginning.

  Kuan-yin asked Mr. Esmeralda, “It has gone wrong?”

  Mr. Esmeralda glanced toward Luisa, to indicate to Kuan-yin that she shouldn’t discuss Tengu business in front of the maid. But he nodded and said, “Badly wrong. There will be serious trouble now.’’

  “What will you do?” asked Kuan-yin, when Luisa had gone back down the short flight of stairs that led to the dining room and the kitchen.

  “I will have to face them, whatever,” said Mr. Esmeralda. “You cannot run away from people like the Circle of Burned Doves. Especially if you want to continue working in Japan.”

  “They will kill you,” said Kuan-yin.

  “No,” said Mr. Esmeralda. “Not yet. They have gone this far, but they have not yet completed whatever it is they want to do. I think I am comparatively safe until they have accomplished their purpose.”

  “You have never told me their purpose.”

  Mr. Esmeralda lifted the points of his collar and began tying his necktie again. “I have not wished to burden you. What they want to do is utterly catastrophic. If I told you, you would not understand. But, I have committed myself to helping them.’’

  “Why?” asked Kuan-yin. In the evening lamplight, her face looked very pretty and serene. “I always thought you were a man of great independence. The son of the great pirate Jesus Esmeralda.”

  Mr. Esmeralda tugged the knot of his necktie straight and examined himself carefully in the gilt-framed mirror that hung on the parlor wall. The shiny hair was perfectly combed back, and the mustache was immaculately scissored. He thought he looked handsome, but also out of date, like a character out of a 1950’s movie. If he hadn’t been able to play the part of “Mr. Esmeralda” as if he were acting, he probably wouldn’t have the nerve to survive. The world in which he lived was dangerous and bizarre, where sudden death was considered to be the least of a man’s worries.

  Kuan-yin stood up and walked across to him, laying her hand on his arm. She said, “It is years since we were lovers.”

  “You cannot measure what I feel for you in years,” he told her, his dark eyes looking down at her with compelling steadiness. There was a moment of silence, and then Kuan-yin let him go. It was no use. He was the kind of man whose soul lived somewhere else, away from his body. What you saw was suntan and greased-back hair and clipped mustache; a papier-mache mask with nothing behind it but cocktails, sentimental chatter, and emptiness. The real Mr. Esmeralda was unreachable.

  “Do you think you are in very great danger?” she asked him.

  He looked at her unblinkingly, and said, “It is no time for losing my head. There is too much money at stake. And too many lives. The Japanese are not deterred by such concepts as fairness or justice; and they are certainly not deterred by American law. If they wish to murder me, they will. But they will have to outwit me first.” When he had finished, he asked Kuan-yin to drive him across to West Los Angeles, to Eva Crowley’s apartment. Kuan-yin said nothing, but went to fetch her cap. In the car, while Mr.

  Esmeralda listened to the radio news in the hope of finding out more about what had happened at Rancho Encino, Kuan-yin remained silent and aloof, although Mr. Esmeralda could see her eyes watching him in the rearview mirror.

  ‘‘What if Commander Ouvarov comes back and finds that you’ve gone out?” she asked him at last.

  “Commander Ouvarov will never come back. Didn’t you hear what they said on the television?

  One of the Japanese was probably killed by his associate. That means that Commander Ouvarov panicked and ran, but not before he had disposed of anyone who could identify him. In my opinion, he probably killed Yoshikazu in the same way. So much less trouble than taking him all the way down to Mexico and smuggling him over the border. Commander Ouvarov is a profiteer, an opportunist, a murderer, a pimp, and a sexual deviant. He had a reputation for efficient organization, and that is why I asked Nancy Shiranuka to hire him. Maybe I was wrong.

  Maybe he was too old for the job. It is too late to be concerned about that now, and too late to be concerned about him. He is probably halfway to Mexico already.”

  “Supposing he goes to the police?”

  “Commander Ouvarov has been involved in too many rackets and too many unsavory deals to risk going to the police. He is still wanted in five states, including Washington and Nevada. He is wanted in New York for jumping bail. Commander Ouvarov will never go to the police.”

  “Not even for a little plea-bargaining?”

  Mr. Esmeralda didn’t answer. He knew from experience how little honor there was among thieves. And among the motley hirelings he had been obliged to collect for the Tengu project, there was no honor whatsoever. All they had in common was fear and greed, and if someone else could frighten them more, or offer them more money, then their allegiance to Mr. Esmeralda would evaporate like Pacific fog. He had no illusions about them.

  Kuan-yin pulled the limousine into the curb outside Eva Crowley’s apartment. Mr. Esmeralda said, “Come back for me at six A.M. Bring some hot towels with you, and a change of clothes.’’

  Kuan-yin said, “You’re not taking the lady any flowers?”

  Mr. Esmeralda smiled at her wryly. “I can do better than that,” he said, and took out of his pocket a gold-and-diamond bracelet.

  Eva Crowley came to the door in a smart, schoolmarmish blouse with a pleated bib and a severe black pencil skin. She said breathlessly, “I didn’t expect to see you again.”

  “But, I’m here,” said Mr. Esmeralda, with a self-satisfied grin. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  “The twins are home. We were just about to have a snack. Then we were going to watch a little television and go to bed.”

  “You don’t want me to meet your daughters?”

  “Well, it’s not that I don’t want you to... ”

  “Then invite me in.” Mr. Esmeralda beamed. He reached through the half-open door and held her wrist. “You can tell them that I am an old friend of your husband’s. A cigar exporter from Dominica.”

  “Well...” Eva hesitated.

  Mr. Esmeralda reached into his pocket and took out the bracelet, dangling it in front of Eva’s eyes. “You won’t even let me in if I bribe you?” he asked her.

  Eva relaxed and smiled. “All right. But only for an hour or so. The girls have to go on a field trip tomorrow for school, and I want them to have a moderately early night.”

  “Your wish is law,” said Mr. Esmeralda, and bowed.

  Inside the Crowley’s apartment, the mathematical sterility of Gerard’s modern Italian decor had already been overwhelmed by dozens of rock records and magazines and scruffy-looking schoolbooks, as well as two girls’ college sweaters, three fluorescent-yellow sneakers, a pink Fiorucci bag crammed with hairbrushes and makeup, and a disassembled hair-dryer which looked as if it could never assembled again. On the Giulini sofa, in tight matador pants and T-shirts, sat Kathryn and Kelly Crowley, both 17, identi
cal twins, painting their toenails, Kathryn plum and Kelly green. They were very pretty girls, an inch taller than their mother, with dark wavy hair and wide slate-and-lavender-colored eyes.

  “We-e-ell,” said Kelly saucily, looking up from her toe-nail painting. “Who’s this, Moth-m?”

  “Don’t you be so fresh,” Eva Crowley snapped back. “This is a business colleague of your father’s, Mr. Esmeralda. Mr. Esmeralda, this is Kelly, and this is Kathryn. Girls, clean up all this mess, will you? Mr. Esmeralda came by to see your father, but the least we can do is offer him a drink. Isn’t that right, Mr. Esmeralda?”

  “It is a great pleasure,” replied Mr. Esmeralda, exaggerating his South American accent. “It isn’t often that one sees one young girl as beautiful as you, let alone two.’’

  “Do you have a Christian name, Mr. Esmeralda?” asked Kathryn boldly.

  Mr. Esmeralda nodded. “I was baptized Jesus, after my father. But, for understandable reasons, most of my close friends call me by second name, Carlos.”

  “I think I prefer Jesus,” said Kathryn.

  “Would you like a drink?” Eva interrupted. “I’ve restocked the cabinet since you were last here.”

  ‘‘Mother’s always restocking the cabinet.’’ Kelly winked at Mr. Esmeralda. “She does like her little celebration now and again.”

  “Thank you, Kelly,” said Eva sharply.

  Mr. Esmeralda said, “I’ll have a negroni, if you don’t mind. Shall I mix my own?”

  “Oh, please.”

  “Can we call you Carlos?” asked Kathryn. “Carlos Esmeralda, it sounds very romantic. Do you come from

  I South America, Carlos?”

  Mr. Esmeralda took out gin and Campari. “I didn’t think for one moment that your daughters would be so grown up,” he told Eva. “when you said ‘twin daughters,’ I imagined two little moppets in ribbons and frills.”

  “Moppets?” Kathryn exclaimed. “I haven’t heard anyone say ‘moppets’ since I was a moppet.

  Oh, you’re wonderful, Carlos. You’re just like Desi Arnaz. Or Ricardo Montalban.”

  “Kathryn, will you stop being so personal” demanded her mother.

  “I don’t mind,” said Mr. Esmeralda, shaking his cocktail in Gerard’s most elegant Italian silver shaker. “When you are swarthy, like me, and when you have a South American accent, as I do, you deliberately cultivate a social personality that is halfway between Edmundo Ros and Rudolph Valentino. Perhaps it’s outdated, but people like it.”

  “You’re so outdated you make me dizzy “ said Kelly.

  Eva laughed. “I hope you can take all this ribbing,” she told Mr. Esmeralda. Mr. Esmeralda poured out his cocktail with all the deftness of a bartender, turned around, raised his glass, and grinned. “From three such beautiful ladies, a man can accept anything.’’

  “Anything!” asked Kelly in a deep, melodramatic voice.

  Mr. Esmeralda put down his glass. “In actual fact, I came here to invite your mother out.

  “We had planned an early evening,” said Eva.

  “I’m sure your lovely daughters will not miss you,” smiled Mr. Esmeralda. “Now please, you cannot refuse me.”

  Eva smiled and blushed. “I don’t know. I shouldn’t really.”

  “Oh, go on. Mother,” insisted Kelly. “God knows you deserve to have a night out. Especially a really old-fashionednight out. What could be better?”

  “All right,” said Eva, after a moment. “But you’ll have to give me a minute to change.”

  “Bravo!” said Kathryn, and clapped her hands over her head.

  While Eva dressed, Mr. Esmeralda mixed himself another negroni, and told the twins fanciful anecdotes about his life in the Caribbean and the Far East, and a farfetched story about the time he had agreed to stand up against a wooden fence in Nightmute, Alaska, as the human target for a Canadian bowie-knife thrower. “The sweat froze on my forehead like seed pearls,” he said, and the girls giggled in disbelief and delight.

  “I can’t think why Mother hasn’t talked about you before,” said Kelly.

  Mr. Esmeralda gave her a noncommittal shrug. “Sometimes a lady likes to keep certain things to herself. Don’t you have secret thoughts, secret ideas, of your own?” He raised one dark, well-combed eyebrow. “Don’t you have your own secret desires?”

  Kathryn giggled. Mr. Esmeralda was so much of a Latin smoothie that she couldn’t decide whether to be amused, amazed, flattered, impressed, or simply skeptical. Yet because he was so stereotypical, because he seemed to have stepped down from the conductor’s podium of some cheap rumba band in Rio de Janeiro, she found herself responding to him in a stereotypical way, flirting with him, flashing her eyes at him, metaphorically clutching a rose between bared teeth.

  “You won’t keep Moth-wout too late, will you?” she asked him. “Or maybe you will.”

  Mr. Esmeralda laughed. It was a laugh as flat and humorless as castanets.

  “We’ll see,” he said. “Life is more exciting when it is uncertain, don’t you think? Certainties dull the palate.”

  Kelly was about to answer when the door opened and her mother reappeared, in the cream-colored Bill Blass cocktail dress she had bought when she first found out about Gerard and Francesca. Her hair was brushed, diamonds sparkled in her ears, she looked prettier and more confident than she had for months. She came across and took Mr. Esmeralda’s arm. He, in turn, laid his hand over hers and smiled as possessively as a bridegroom.

  “You have beautiful daughters,” he told her. “And it is very easy to see how they inherited their looks.”

  “You’re teasing me,” said Eva.

  “No,” said Mr. Esmeralda. “It is one of the firmest rules of my life, never to tease.”

  They were driven by taxi to the Occidental Center on South Olive. It would have been easier for Kuan-yin to drive them, but Mr. Esmeralda did not want to risk being seen too obviously in public with Eva. It was a question of discretion, rather than absolute secrecy. In the back of the taxi, Eva said, “I haven’t been taken out by a strange man for years.”

  “I am so strange?” asked Mr. Esmeralda.

  She looked at him. “No,” she said. “Not so strange. Not really.”

  They knew Mr. Esmcralda well at The Tower; he was ushered at once to a table by the window, overlooking the twinkling lights of Greater L.A. He ordered drinks for both of them and talked fluently and endlessly, about money, about trading, about the Far East, about the beauty and perversity of life in Bangkok, Rangoon, Shanghai and Ho Chi Minh City, once called Saigon.

  “You must have known a great many women,” Eva told him gently.

  Mr. Esmeralda shook his head. “I am a selective man; not promiscuous. Of course one could have women, thousands of them. But that kind of life means nothing to me. What I have always sought is the woman who can give me a deep, romantic affair; an affair with roses and wine and dancing, and expressions of true love. Perhaps not an affair that lasts forever, but one which ends with no regret, no bitter feelings, and no promises.”

  Eva set down her glass, then reached across the table and took Mr. Esmeralda’s hand. She stared into his eyes for a long time, as if she were searching for reassurance. She said, “I have to tell you the truth, Carlos. I’ve never felt this way about anyone else, apart from Gerard. This is the first time in all of my years of marriage that I’ve actually dared to believe I could be happy.”

  “Gerard makes you so miserable?”

  She looked away. “Gerard still attracts me. Perhaps I’m a masochist. Perhaps I get some painful pleasure out of being cheated. Perhaps I deserve everything I get.”

  “Would you like to think that you arc a martyr? St. Eva the Sanctimonious, broken on the wheel of her husband’s inconstancy?”

  “That’s unfair.”

  “No,” said Mr. Esmeralda. “It is quite true. If you were really angry at Gerard, you would have left him years ago. But you enjoy being degraded. You enjoy catching Gerard with Francesca, a
nd hearing about his passion for her. It excites you. It gives your life some spice, some variety.

  It makes you believe that Gerard is more exciting then he really is. He must be, if some other girl wants him, too. A pretty young girl like Francesca. The fact is, however, that Gerard is an uninteresting petty criminal; a man whose little struggles with authority have done nothing to mature a personality that is essentially boorish and self-centered and vulgar. Some men, if they had been schooled in the same way that Gerard has, would have become swashbuckling heroes.

  Gerard has achieved nothing but a condition of abject meanness, both of spirit and of flesh. It is time you recognized it, if you haven’t already. And it is time you said to yourself, ‘Is this what I really want for the rest of my life? A man like Gerard?”

  Eva said in a hushed voice, “Mr. Esmeralda, you’re wooing me.”

  “Wooing?” he asked in surprise. Then, “Yes, if you want to use such a word. Yes, I suppose I am.

  Wooing.

  She stared across the restaurant unashamedly admiring her own reflection in the glass of a picture frame for a long time, while Mr. Esmeralda admired her profile. It was her better profile thank God; and the flickering candlelight gave her looks magic which made her appear younger, more serene, mysterious. Shcfe/t mysterious, too, which helped. Calm and erotic and mysterious. And drunk.

  “I suppose you want to go to bed with me,” she said. The words didn’t quite come out the way she had meant them to. They sounded squeaky and unbalanced, instead of alluring and Garboesque; but once she’d spoken them it was too late. She turned and stared at him, and he stared back.

  “Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

  They were silent in the taxi on the way back to Eva’s apartment. They didn’t even hold hands.

  When Eva let them in, they found that the twins had gone to bed. The sitting room was tidied up and in darkness. Mr. Esmeralda loosened his necktie and said, “How much would you like a cocktail?”

  Eva came back across the soft white carpet and put her arms around his neck, kissing the tip of his nose. “Not as much as I’d like you.”