The City

by Dean Koontz

  “I wish to give you six coconut cookies with chocolate chips, which I have made myself and which I hope you will find edible.”

  “You’re baking now?” I asked.

  “I have been inspired by your mother’s creations, and I find the process of baking to be quite relaxing.”

  “Should we have one now?”

  “I would make no objection.”

  I put the container on a little table between the chairs and said, “What can I bring you to drink? I still can’t make good tea.”

  He smiled and nodded to indicate that the lack of tea didn’t disappoint him. “I have as well acquired an appreciation for Coca-Cola, if you should have any.”

  I brought two bottles of Coke, two glasses of ice, and a few paper napkins on a tray, and we sat side by side, the table between us. When I broke the Scotch tape and opened the lid of the makeshift container, the aroma of the cookies made my mouth water. “These smell amazing.”

  “I found the instructions in a magazine that I have been told is well regarded. After baking two batches that were inadequate, I made some changes to the recipe.”

  The cookies tasted even better than they smelled. “These are so great. You should open a cookie store or something.”

  “I am only a tailor, though I have considered writing to the magazine and sending them my corrected recipe. I am afraid, however, that they will not receive it with appreciation. It is good to see you again, Jonah.”

  “It’s good to see you, too. It really is.”

  “This is a nice house and a pretty street with all the trees. I wish very much that you are happy here.”

  “I am,” I said and didn’t burden him with my concerns. In truth, I couldn’t share my latest worries unless I revealed the final secret that I’d been keeping from him—Miss Pearl. I continued to feel that I wasn’t meant to speak of her to anyone, that her visitations with me were in some way hallowed.

  We spoke of everyday things for a few minutes, and then he told me about how Mr. Tamazaki of the Daily News had approached the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles and how, through them, he had found Setsuko Nozawa in Charleston, Illinois. The previous day, Thursday, Mr. Tamazaki had given a detailed report of Mrs. Nozawa’s discoveries to Mr. Yoshioka and then had set out with enthusiasm on a three-day holiday to Asbury Park, New Jersey.

  Mr. Yoshioka confided that he found Asbury Park an unlikely vacation site for Mr. Tamazaki, who was shy, neither a swimmer nor a sunbather, and had no interest in the usually frivolous pursuits offered by seaside resort communities. Because Mr. Tamazaki had gone all the way to Asbury Park five times in the past year, however, and regardless of the weather, perhaps it was reasonable to surmise that what attracted him was not the town but romance.

  “At mid-life,” Mr. Yoshioka said, “I believe he has developed a great affection for a woman who, unfortunately for both of them, resides at a distance from him. But that inconvenience is a small matter if he has found love in a world with so little of it.”

  Mr. Yoshioka shared with me all that Setsuko Nozawa had learned. Of course, he didn’t know that she had tried to reach Yabu Tamazaki one more time, that she had phoned repeatedly during the past twenty-four hours, after the curator of the morgue had set out for Asbury Park. She hadn’t been able to pass along the news about Dr. Mace-Maskil’s colorful visit to her shop or the circumstantial evidence suggesting that he’d conspired with Lucas Drackman to have Mrs. Mace-Maskil murdered. All of that we would learn only in time, because we didn’t then live in an age of cell phones and text messaging.

  “I have passed all this along to Mr. Nakama Otani, who is once more involved. He will coordinate the facts from Mrs. Nozawa with other information that he has recently found and is still finding, and when he believes that he has put together a convincing case, he will go to his superiors and seek to open an active file.”

  Half dizzy from listening to all these developments, I said, “Who are his superiors, where does he work?”

  “Mr. Otani is a homicide detective.”

  “But you didn’t want to go to the police.”

  After taking a sip of Coca-Cola, Mr. Yoshioka said, “I did not go to the police, Jonah. I went to Mr. Otani not in his capacity as an officer of the law, but as a fellow inmate of Manzanar.”

  “Oh.”

  “My journey through the relocation camp left me distrustful of the law. However, Mr. Otani learned a much different lesson from the experience. Because the same legal system that abused us within a few years restored to us our rights as citizens, Mr. Otani developed much respect for it and chose to become a police officer and eventually a detective. I have thought about this for quite a long time, and I must acknowledge that he is a better man than I am.”

  I didn’t like to hear him say that. In fact, I couldn’t abide hearing it. “He’s not a better man than you. You just … well, you lost more there than he did.”

  He stared at me in silence for a moment and then looked out at the maples trembling and so green in the faint breeze. Finally he said, “You often surprise me, Jonah.”

  “Well, it’s only the truth. What did I say wrong?”

  “You said nothing wrong. Yes, it is the truth. Mr. Otani lost no one at the camp, thank God. But that does not excuse my failure to distinguish between an act of fate—the fire—and the acts of men. I blamed men equally for our incarceration and my loss, and that was a mistake that has shaped my life ever since.”

  “Mistake? No. Your mom and sister wouldn’t have been there in the first place if the law hadn’t sent them.”

  “Which is the way I thought until, so recently, I have seen that I was wrong.”

  “Man, you’re so hard on yourself, way too hard.”

  He looked at me again and smiled. “If I am not hard on myself, Jonah, who will be? It is not a good thing to be soft on oneself.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Usually that didn’t prevent me from chattering away as usual, but this time I sat in silence.

  Mr. Yoshioka said, “Police photographers took hundreds of photos during the course of the demonstration at City College on Monday. Mr. Otani quietly reviewed them and found Miss Delvane, your father, Mr. Smaller, Mr. Drackman, and Miss Cassidy.”

  “Her there, her, too?”

  “Of course, it is their right to protest. Free speech.”

  “Then what does it mean that he found them?”

  “Mr. Otani believes Lucas Drackman is living in the city under a false identity. The Drackman Family Trust, the vehicle through which the estate was passed from his murdered parents to him, still exists in Illinois. And in fact, the trust owns property here in the city. Mr. Otani is now seeking the address or addresses.”

  “You think that’s where he lives?”

  “It may be where he and Miss Cassidy live and where your father and Miss Delvane went, too, when they disappeared from their previous apartment. It may also be where Mr. Smaller now resides.”

  “But isn’t he at the apartment building?”

  “He quit his job Friday of last week, moved out, and left no forwarding address.”

  I pressed the cold glass of Coke to my brow. “I feel like my head is gonna explode.”

  “That cannot be a good feeling. Speaking of explosions, Mr. Otani has also discovered that Miss Cassidy is a graduate of one of the city’s universities, where she earned a degree in chemistry.”

  “Wow.”

  “As you say, ‘wow.’ Mr. Otani hopes to show not just that the five of them were at the demonstration but that they also live at the same address, at least one of them under a false name and no doubt in possession of forged ID. That alone would not be enough to persuade his superiors to open a case file, but when combined with the information provided earlier by Mr. Tamazaki and recently by Mrs. Nozawa, it should be, as he put it, ‘a slam dunk,’ which I believe is a football reference.”

  “Basketball,” I said.

  “Ah. Then I stand corrected. Therefore, i
f he can get a warrant to search the premises for the stolen jade, whatever other evidence is discovered in the process might put Mr. Drackman and Miss Cassidy in prison not merely for armed robbery and terrorism but also for murder.”

  If that were to happen, I could at last stop worrying about all of them, about my father, too, because although Tilton hadn’t killed anyone and wouldn’t get a life sentence for murder, he would have a home behind bars for years.

  I supposed Grandpa Teddy and perhaps even my mother would think I should regret my father’s downfall and incarceration rather than celebrate it. Well, good luck with that. The best they could expect was that maybe I wouldn’t gloat so much, they’d feel the need to say extraordinary prayers for my soul.

  “How soon can Mr. Otani get his boss to open a case file?”

  “He thinks that he will have everything he needs before noon Saturday.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “I will keep you informed. I hope that you understand what we must do if Mr. Otani’s superiors agree to proceed as he wishes.”

  His stare was direct and his expression one of polite concern, as minimalist as most of his expressions, but I sensed that “what we must do” would prove to be something that I might find unpleasant in the extreme.

  When I couldn’t infer what that might be from what he had said, he illuminated the situation for me: “When the case file is opened and the police go to court to obtain a search warrant, I must return here so that you and I may sit down with your mother and reveal to her everything that you withheld and everything that you and I have conspired to do together.”

  I thought this must be how men on death row felt. “Everything?”

  “Yes, Jonah, there is no other choice.”

  “Well, maybe there is.”

  “No, there is not.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I am quite certain. And so are you.”

  I couldn’t meet his steady eyes and continue to pretend there might be another option, but when I looked away from him, even then I couldn’t maintain that pretense. “All right. Okay. You’re right. But … oh, man, this is going to be a bloodbath.”

  He frowned. “Surely you do not believe that your mother, the kind of good woman that she is, would resort to violence?”

  “No, sir. I was just … exaggerating. I guess … fear gets my imagination running. I have a big imagination.”

  “If it gives you some comfort, I assure you that I will do my very best to help your mother understand that your reasons for so often deceiving her were for the most part honorable and otherwise attributable to the foolishness of youth.”

  I returned his frown to him. “Thanks. I guess.”

  “Now I should be going.” He rose from the chair, adjusted his shirt cuffs, his coat, his tie, his display handkerchief, and when he looked like he belonged in a magazine ad, he smiled at me. “I must tell you, Jonah, that in spite of the anxiety and the stress that it sometimes occasioned, I did enjoy this adventure that we have been through together.”

  I said, “Me, too,” and meant it.

  He bowed to me, and I bowed to him.

  He held out his hand, and I shook it.

  I almost threw my arms around him and hugged him tight, but I didn’t know what he would think of that, whether it might embarrass him. And so I restrained myself. One more thing eventually to regret.

  “I will most likely call regardless of whether or not it is the time of the day when you are alone.”

  “Yeah. I know. I understand.”

  He went down the steps, along the walkway, and turned left on the sidewalk, making his way back to the bus stop on the main avenue.

  As I had watched Miss Pearl until she moved out of sight in the opposite direction on Wednesday, so now I watched Mr. Yoshioka. As he dwindled into the summer heat, I realized that at some point in the past several months, I had stopped thinking of him as a small man, that every time I saw him, he seemed to have grown taller.

  I cleaned off the porch table, washed the glasses we had used, put the four remaining cookies in a plastic bag, and concealed them in my nightstand to avoid explaining where I’d gotten them. One last deception.

  68

  We would eventually learn that in the same hour as Mr. Yoshioka visited me, Setsuko Nozawa tried again to reach Mr. Tamazaki at the Daily News. She learned he was on holiday and would return on Monday. He had believed that her report to him had been complete, and she had thought so, too, until the crazy professor popped up like a nutty Sid Caesar character on that old Your Show of Shows. The new information she acquired would be of value to the reporter, but since all of this had to do with events that occurred years earlier, she imagined it would be no less valuable to him on Monday than it would be now.

  We couldn’t know then that the coming Monday would be the day when so many lives would be changed forever—or ended.

  Elsewhere in Charleston, Illinois, at the stately Georgian home of Dr. Jubal Mace-Maskil, the professor hadn’t risen from bed until past noon. Although sober, he felt queasy. He felt also as if he’d been thrashed, but his mind was clear.

  Eventually we would learn in great detail everything Dr. MaceMaskil thought and did during those days. In time, when interrogated by the police, against the advice of his attorney, the professor proved to be a talkative self-dramatizer motivated nearly as much by self-pity as by a sense of his historical importance to the utopian movements of his day.

  Now sober, he considered the illegal substances that he had consumed the previous day, and upon reflection, he understood where he had gone wrong, what wicked combination of drugs had cast him into an abyss of paranoia. When he heard of Mrs. Nozawa’s visit to the Alumni Affairs Office, he had leaped to the ridiculous conclusion that Lucas was about to be revealed as a murderer for hire. Actually, the boy was just a murderer, as he didn’t always kill for money. In fact, he had refused to charge his beloved mentor for the elimination of the tiresome Noreen Wallis Mace-Maskil, formerly Noreen Wallis Norville, of the Grosse Pointe Norvilles. “You’ll just owe me one,” Lucas said when refusing payment, which had delighted Jubal until, as time passed, he’d begun to wonder what that “one” might entail.

  He had thought Lucas was committed to the Cause—Jubal always capitalized the word in his mind—but in the four years since the boy graduated, he’d spent much of his time adrift, distracted by carnal pleasures. Oh, now and then, Lucas got up to something worthwhile—a train derailment, other bits of sabotage, an unsuspecting policeman executed with a point-blank round to the back of the head—but considering his sharp mind and potential, he was an underachiever.

  Lately, Dr. Mace-Maskil had become concerned that Lucas might be less interested in the Cause than in taking enormous risks largely for the thrill of it. After all, he had shot the policeman outside of a Chinese restaurant, on a busy street, where there were potential witnesses, taking advantage of an unanticipated opportunity. With lightning cunning, he calculated the line-of-sight issues, determined that a blind spot existed, shot the cop, thrust the pistol into the coat pocket of a wild-haired, disoriented homeless man, shouting, “I got him, I got the bastard, help me here!” When a few men joined him in the effort to subdue the terrified bum, he used the confusion to fade out of the scene. He thought himself superior, of Nietzsche’s master race, and on a regular basis, he seemed to need to prove his supreme nature by taking an outrageous risk and getting away with it.

  When Lucas derailed a train or shot a cop on a public street for the thrill of it and to prove his superior nature, instead of taking the time and care to plan a more significant operation that could be pulled off with much greater confidence that no evidence would lead to the perpetrators … Well, such recklessness also put the professor at risk. He’d taken some years to realize that if Lucas were arrested and convicted of just one murder, he might negotiate an adjustment in his sentence by ratting out others whom those in power would delight in persecuting. Like Dr. Jubal Mace-Maskil. The �
��one” that he owed his former student might prove to be his own destruction for the purpose of shaving a few years off Lucas’s sentence or to buy the boy certain prison privileges that he might not otherwise receive.

  Here in the light of a new day, in the cruel grip of sobriety, the professor understood, as he never quite had before, that his very freedom depended on Lucas remaining free, as well. Therefore, he felt that he should without delay phone his former student and tell him about Mrs. Nozawa’s curious visit to the Alumni Affairs Office. Each time that Lucas changed phone numbers, he gave his mentor the new contact information, though he usually didn’t provide an address or a mail drop. Informed of Mrs. Nozawa’s interest in him, Lucas would most likely want to come to Charleston and take the woman to some quiet and private place, to discover what her true intentions were, since they were surely not related to any act of kindness for which he had not been properly thanked.

  Twice, the professor picked up the phone and started to enter Lucas’s latest number, but both times he hung up after pressing fewer than half the digits. Drug-free, Dr. Mace-Maskil’s mind no longer spun in a tornado of paranoia, but he was shrewd enough to recognize in this situation a real danger to himself if his former student returned to Charleston to squeeze information out of the queen of dry-cleaning. Lucas might learn not only why she had an interest in him, but also about his old professor’s strange visit to her shop. By that performance, Dr. Mace-Maskil had made himself a subject of interest when he previously had not been one, and it surely fed the woman’s curiosity and suspicions regarding Lucas, whatever they might be. In a blink, the beloved mentor might become the intolerable burden, and following Lucas’s visit to Charleston, the town’s population might drop by two.

  The professor decided to be prudent, to think through all of the possible ramifications, before phoning Lucas. He canceled his Friday classes to give himself time to consider his options, to ferret out the pluses and minuses of each, and to prepare defenses commensurate for the choice he ultimately made.