“Sure,” Jerry told him. “Mack? Maurice? Olive? You want to go?”
Down at police headquarters, accompanied by a sweaty and pasty-faced Skrolnik, who was exhausted after a long and futile night of questioning, arguing, and delicatessen coffee, they stared at Mr. Esmeralda through the two-way mirror in the side of his cell. Jerry said with certainty, “That’s the man I saw at Orchid Place, the day Sherry Cantor was murdered.”
“You’re sure of that?” asked Skrolnik.
“Positive. He was standing in the street, watching my house. I remember thinking that he looked like somebody out of an old Humphrey Bogart movie.”
“We think he’s the ringleader,” said Skrolnik.
Detective Pullet came into the room just then and gave Maurice a funny, half-apologetic smile.
“We’re still getting in data from the CIA on Esmeralda’s activities abroad. Apparently he’s been dealing with arms and drugs and stolen antique furniture like he’s Ralph’s or something. Hello, Mr. Needs. Glad you could be here.”
“The pleasure’s mutual,” said Maurice. “How’s the lateral thinking?”
“Still going strong,” said Pullet. “We’ll crack this business before you know it.”
“Not if you think that Esmeralda is the ringleader,” Jerry told him.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Skrolnik demanded.
Jerry said, “Is there some place where we can talk? In private?”
“Sure,” grunted Skrolnik. “Come across to Welch’s and watch me eat breakfast. You like corned-beef hash? They do the best.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Mr. Esmeralda was released on $50,000 bail at two o’clock that afternoon, and told that he was not to leave the city of Los Angeles. His attorney told Judge T. N. Slattery that his client was “a pillar of international goodwill.” The prosecution raised no objection to the granting of bail, especially since Mr. Esmeralda had no previous criminal record in the United States, and had once been decorated by President Sukarno of Indonesia for “services to the people of Djokjakarta and Surakarta.”
Immediately after he left the courthouse in the company of his lawyer, Mr. Esmeralda caught a taxi to his address on Camden Drive, where he stayed for two hours, until just after 4:20 P.M., talking on the telephone. All of his conversations during this period were tapped by the police, under the jurisdiction of a special warrant.
His first call was to Mercury Custom Air Services, at Torrance Municipal Airport, confirming his booking of a Gulfstream III for 7:45 that evening. Destination: Liberal, Kansas.
“Liberal, Kansas?” asked Skrolnik, wrinkling up his nose.
Pullet said, “I’ll check with the private air services at Liberal. He’s bound to be using it as nothing more than a stopover.’’
The next call that Mr. Esmeralda made was to Twentieth-Century Bandbox, a dry-cleaning company, asking them to send over his two white suits and six shirts.
The third call was more mysterious. It was traced to the number of a house in Laurel Canyon.
Mr. Esmeralda said, “Tell Kappa I was picked up by the police for a traffic offense. A rearender, nothing serious. I’m out now, and everything’s fine for tonight. Everything’s arranged. Kappa can leave immediately away for Marina del Key. Yes, I know. But tell him everything’s fine. I’ll come to the house at seven precisely and make sure that everything’s going smoothly. How’s the Tengu? You did the Hour of Fire? He’s fine? Okay, doctor. Okay. That’s good. Tonight’s the night, then. I’ll see you when I see you. Just one thing–Kuan-yin’s all right? What? You’re sure about that? Very well. All right. Take care of that Tengu.”
The fourth call was to a man called John O’Toole, of O’Toole’s Luxury Yachts, at Tahiti Way, Marina del Key.
“The yacht is ready, Mr. O’Toole? That’s excellent. My clients will be ready to leave in less than an hour. Very well. No, you have no need to do that. Good. And, listen, you don’t have to worry about yesterday. I know who that man was, the one who answered the phone at the ranch.
You have nothing to worry about. Yes. That’s right. Thank you.”
Skrolnik listened to the last conversation and sat back in his swivel chair. “Tonight’s the night, then? And they’re going to do something with that Tengu of theirs?”
“That’s right,” Jerry nodded.
“He didn’t give any indication, did he? No indication at all.”
“I’d bust him now, if I were you,” said Mack.
Skrolnik shook his head. “I’ve learned my lesson often enough, Mr. Holt. You don’t jump on anybody until they’re actually involved in the commission of a crime, in flagrante. The times I’ve gone to court with wiretaps that would make your curly hair stand on end, and had them thrown out because conspiracy to commit a crime, without the crime having actually been committed, is one of the hardest imaginable offenses to prove. All Esmeralda has to do is say, ‘I was joking, Your Honor. I was fooling around with a friend.’ And anyway, you take a look at a transcript of those conversations, and you won’t see nothing, nothing indictable. He spent most of his time saying ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and ‘okay,’ and unless you can establish exactly what it was he was talking about, you won’t get anywhere.”
Jerry said, “What are you going to do?” Skrolnik grimaced. “I’m going to do my duty, Mr. Sennett. Ordinary, functional police work. I’m going to have Esmeralda tailed, and arrested if he attempts to leave Los Angeles in contravention of the terms of his bail. I’m going to assign a team to track down that house in Laurel Canyon and follow the Tengu wherever he goes. Any attempt by the Tengu or any of his assistants to commit any kind of violent crime, and shazamI’m going to throw his tail in jail.”
There was a silence. Then Mack said, “How?”
“How what?” asked Skrolnik crossly.
“How are you going to throw the Tengu’s tail in jail? I thought the Tengus were pretty well unstoppable. Look what you had to do at Rancho Encino. The thing was dead, supposedly, and it still came after you.”
“You weren’t there at Rancho Encino,” said Skrolnik.
“No, I wasn’t. But from what Jerry’s told me, it sounds like these Tengus are pretty invincible characters.”
Skrolnik stood up, wrapping his beefy arms around his chest. “Let me tell you something, junior,” he said. “When that Tengu came for me at Rancho Encino, it had no head.”
“No keacft” asked Jerry.
“That’s right. Calsbeek’s men had blown its head clean off its shoulders. But that didn’t stop it. It came right on in there, headless. We burned it, but if we hadn’t, it would probably have torn us to pieces. So I know what I’m talking about, and when I say that I’m going to throw that Tengu’s tail in jail, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
“What did you do with the ashes?” asked Jerry.
“What?” frowned Skrolnik.
“Even a Tengu’s ashes are capable of being revived by the appropriate ceremony,” said Jerry.
Skrolnik made a dozen faces, each one more grotesque than the last. “Just leave this fucking thing to me, will you? That’s all I ask. If I make a mistake, let it be my mistake,not yours. You got me?”
“You’ll keep us in touch?” asked Jerry. “Sure, I’ll keep you in touch. Now, why don’t you get back home and watch the whole thing on television. You’ll be warmer and safer, and you won’t be getting under my feet.”
Mack said, “Wait a minute...” but Jerry took his arm and raised a finger to tell him that he should keep quiet.
They went across the street to Welch’s, and ordered hamburgers and beer. Jerry went to the pay phone and called David. Gerard was being the prefect babysitter, David told him. They had been playing checkers together, and so far David was ahead by nine games to six. “He told me what he did in Cuba, and all about the time when he was a boy on a tobacco farm.”
Jerry said, “Underneath that frozen exterior, I think a nice guy may be thawing out. Take care, David. I love you,
and I’ll see you later.”
When he got back to the table, Maurice said, “I’ve been thinking, you know?”
“You’ve been thinking!” Mack teased him. “Do you mind if I call the networks?”
‘‘No, seriously,’’ said Maurice. “They’ve got one Tengu left, okay? But even if there’s only one, the cops don’t have much chance of stopping him, do they? They don’t have much chance of knocking him off before he does anything really serious.”
“It took an atomic bomb to wipe out the first community of Tengus,” agreed Jerry.
“Right,” said Maurice. “But supposing the Tengu met up with another Tengu–an even stronger Tengu?”
“Maurice,” you’re talking through your ass,” said Mack. “If there’s only one Tengu left, where’s this other Tengu, this even stronger Tengu?”
Mack knew what Maurice was trying to suggest even before he’d finished speaking, but the idea of it was so stunning that there was nothing he could do but sit there with his half-eaten cheeseburger in one hand and his mouth open and wait for Maurice to point to his own T-shirted chest and say, “Right here. Me. I could be a Tengu, couldn’t I?”
Jerry said intently, “Maurice, you don’t even know what you’re suggesting. The only way in which anybody can open themselves up to being possessed by the Tengu is through excruciating agony.
That, and all the necessary invocations and rituals.”
“You’ve got that Japanese woman, don’t you?” asked Maurice. “That Nancy Shiranuka. She’d know all the rituals.”
“Well, I guess she would, but...”
“But nothing. Let’s go over there and ask her to do it.”
“Are you crazy?” Jerry hissed at him. “To turn yourself into a Tengu would mean pain so great that you wouldn’t even know where you were. Besides, once you’w been possessed, it isn’t that easy to become awpossessed, to be exorcized. Nancy Shiranuka almost died when she was purified of one of her Japanese demons. And that demon was nothing compared to the Tengu.
The Tengu is absolutely the worst demon ever.’’
Maurice put down his avocado-and-bacon burger, his second. “Listen,” he said quietly, “what you guys don’t seem to understand is that I’m just a strongman in the circus. El Krusho, nothing else. Can you imagine what it’s like, being El Krusho? Even my fucking name’s a joke. I bend steel bars in my teeth, and pick up fat ladies, one in each hand, and if I accidentally slip a finger up their snatch when I’m lifting them, they love me forever. I’m nothing, man. A pile of muscles, a freak show. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a different pretty girl every Saturday night, and a $20 bonus to buy myself a steak dinner at Charlie’s. I run a creaking ‘69 Corvette, and all I own in the world is three pairs of sneakers and about 108 T-shirts.”
“So?” Mack challenged him.
“So, I want to do something exciting, weird, different. What we did yesterday, attacking that ranch–that was a blast. I haven’t done anything like that in my whole life. Listen, you think I’m afraid of some pain? Have you tried lifting weights, working out in a gym?
You want to talk about pain, when you’re lifting 350 kilos of solid iron?”
“Maurice,” said Jerry, “this is something different. This is spiritual pain, too.’’
“So what are you going to do?” Maurice demanded. “You’re going to let this Tengu character run around killing people? Or what?”
Jerry looked across the table at Mack, and suddenly he didn’t feel hungry anymore. Mack shrugged. Maurice was one of those plain people who were impossible to convince of anything, if they didn’t want to be convinced.
“We don’t have too much time,” said Jerry. “A couple of hours, at the most. That may not be long enough. You may go through a whole lot of pain for nothing.”
“The sooner we get started, the better, huh?” said Maurice.
Mack said, “For Christ’s sake, Maurice. You want to be a martyr or something?”
“I don’t know,” said El Krusho. “Maybe. Anything’s better than being El Krusho.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
In Nancy Shiranuka’s apartment on Alta Loma Road, Maurice Needs went through the pain and the ritual required to make him a Tengu.
Gerard Crowley and Jerry Sennett tied his wrists and ankles, and then left him in the bedroom with Nancy. Mack Holt had already started on the Gekkeikan sake, and they silently joined him, sitting on zabutons with their legs uncomfortably crossed, trying not to think of the agonies Maurice was voluntarily suffering in the next room.
Nancy had reduced the light in the bedroom to a single crimson candle. She was naked, except for the tight silk ribbon which she wore around her waist to keep her carved jade harikata in place. Her skin was shiny with perfumed oil, and her hair was tied tightly back from her forehead.
She sang to him “The Song of the Lost Warrior’’ and then “The Night Forest.” As she sang, she began to scratch his chest with steel skewers, gently at first, more irritating than painful; but then deeper, until his chest and his stomach were scored with their points, and the blood began to break through the skin in rows of crimson beads. For the first time, he closed his eyes and gritted his teeth.
There was one advantage that Nancy Skiranuka had over Doctor Gempaku: she had been possessed by a demon herself, and she had been a member of the Shrine of the Seven Black Kami. She knew what the world of the demons felt like. She could sense when she was getting close to that dark, fluttering, cloud-world of evil beings. She could summon them by name. She knew what each of them sounded and smelled like: O Goncho, the wolf-howling bird of Yamahiro; Jinshin Uwo, the beast of earthquakes; Kappa; and Raiden, the thunder devil. They were stylized and fanciful beings in Japanese literature and art. Millennia of educated priests had changed their faces and distorted their legends. But Nancy knew they were real. She had experienced the ghostly shadows of their malevolence inside her head. Their ill will had twisted her body, and their corruption had almost destroyed her.
She chanted the longest of the devil-summoning rituals of the Shrine of the Seven Black Kami: the Calling Down. In the next room, Jerry and Gerard and Mack looked at each other in subdued silence, and poured out another round of Gekkeikan. Whether this was right or wrong, it was more than they could bear.
Mack unexpectedly began to recite the 23rd Psalm. Gerard didn’t join in, but he closed his eyes and lowered his head, and when Mack had finished, he said, “Amen.” Only Jerry remained stiff and quiet, with his eyes wide open.
Nancy slowly twisted and dug the skewers into the muscles of El Krusho’s arms and chest. There was a crackling, tearing sound as she lifted the pectorals away from his chest. She didn’t have the ritual silver claws that Doctor Gempaku had used, but she was capable of inflicting sufficient pain to rouse up the Tengu.
“Tengu, come into your slave,” she chanted. “Tengu, possess your slave. Tengu, O emperor of all that is violent and corrupt, come into him.” As she chanted, she lifted herself slightly up and down, so that her heel pushed the jade dildo in and out of Tier. She closed her eyes in a mixture of ecstasy and agony.
Outside, Gerard said, “I don’t know why the hell Esmeralda kidnapped my wife and daughters. I don’t know why the hell he did that.”
Mack said, “You’ll find out soon enough.”
“Well, I don’t know whether I will,” said Gerard, patting his pockets in search of cigars which he knew very well he didn’t have.
In the bedroom, Nancy leaned over El Krusho’s bleeding chest and slowly sliced the point of a Japanese cooking knife deep into his upper arm. She had seven knives in all, representing the Seven Black Kami, and with these she pinned El Krusho’s flesh to the wooden floor of her apartment. El Krusho twitched and groaned out loud, but his eyes were closed now, and he was already approaching the first levels of a deep trance.
Now, with El Krusho crucified to the floor, Nancy lit incense. The sacred smoke trailed over him, and perfumed the air with rare and expensive spices, in a
way which would entice a demon.
Her voice became so high-pitched and strange that Mack, in the next room, raised his head in bewilderment. “What the hell’s that woman doing in there?”
Another hour passed. It was well past seven. Outside the apartment, the sun was sinking into the evening smog of the Pacific shoreline like an angry and sullen god. Jerry leaned against the window and watched the skyline over downtown Los Angeles slowly turn purple, the color of grape jelly stirred into cream of wheat. He had telephoned David a half-hour ago, and David was fine.
Gerard checked his watch. “If this takes any longer, we’ll be too late,” he said. He turned the sake flask upside down, but it was empty. “Mack,’’ he said, “go take a look in that liquor cabinet.
See if Tokyo Lil’s got any more sake.”
Jerry shot Gerard a sharp, critical look. Gerard shrugged and said, “I’m sorry. I’m just edgy, is all.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Eva Crowley had never felt so humiliated. Nor had she ever felt so frightened. Not just for herself, but for her children. After a day’s naked captivity in Mr. Esmeralda’s apartment, without food or water or sanitary facilities, hours in which they had alternately wept and talked and argued with each other, sometimes hysterical, sometimes calm, sometimes vengeful, they had at last been let out and told to dress themselves under the unblinking supervision of their black-masked Out guard. They hadn’t argued. The guard had kept his Uzi machine gun raised at them the whole time they were dressing, and had then hurried them out of Mr. Esmeralda’s house into his waiting Lincoln limousine.
“I hope you have not had too uncomfortable a day,” Mr. Esmeralda had asked Eva smoothly, as he drove out into the evening traffic. Eva had said nothing. She had been shaking with rage and fear and embarrassment. Now, as they cruised softly southward on the San Diego Freeway, past Culver City and Inglewood, she sat with her face close to the limousine’s tinted window, watching the sun set beyond the airport, and the red-and-amber lights of the cars overtaking them on either side. Kathryn silently cried, she hadn’t stopped crying since this afternoon. Kelly tried to comfort her, but she too was stony-faced with shock.
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