A Knife Edge

by David Rollins

  The fat business guy had muscled his way up to the microphone again and was launching into “Stairway to Heaven.” Or hell, depending on your point of view. The female company at his table applauded. I wanted to throw tomatoes, or, this being Japan, star-knives.

  “So that's your background, the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations?” Durban asked.

  I nodded.

  “OSI.” Something flickered across her face. “Jesus! I recognize you now.”

  “Recognize me?”

  “Yeah. The rank threw me. You were a lieutenant back then, right? Lieutenant Cooper. That's right, I remember reading about you. You busted up an arms-smuggling ring in Afghanistan. You were on that CH-47 that got shot out of the sky by the Taliban. Yeah, I read about you.”

  I ignored the wrath of the gods, poured myself sake, and tossed it down. The whole Afghanistan thing was still giving me nightmares.

  “You're a bit of a hero,” she persisted, ignoring my body language. I was squirming. I've come to realize that there's not a lot of difference between a coward and a hero. The situation itself rather than a conscious decision often dictates a man's actions. I've seen heroes do cowardly things. And I once saw a man everyone thought was a coward rescue a dog chained to a booby-trapped 155-mm artillery shell. Both were killed when the device blew a swimming-pool-sized crater in the dirt. When I looked back on my service record, the moments recorded as glorious sparked only cold fear, loneliness, and a sense of point-lessness. And, of course, along with the cowards, many of the heroes I've known are also dead. Their heroism had done little or nothing to alter an outcome. Out of all this, one eternal truth has struck me—Death ain't real choosy.

  “You okay?” I heard her voice as if from a distance. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “What? No, nothing. What about you? Why the CIA?”

  “My story's not nearly as exciting as yours, I'm afraid. I grew up in a Park Avenue apartment. Only child. Father was a banker, Mother a professional drinker—brandy with vodka chasers. Good schools. NYU, poli sci, psych, and languages.”

  So much for first impressions being wrong. “That's where you learned Japanese?”

  “No. We had a Japanese doorman. I fucked him on my thirteenth birthday when my mom was in bed with the bottle and my father was on some business trip. The doorman was the only one who remembered.” She forgot about the gods and poured herself sake like she was trying to forget. The drink brought back her smile. “You know, the best way to learn a language is on your back?”

  The hand was on my leg again. “As for why the CIA,” she said, “I was recruited in college. My mother wasn't too happy about it but I think my father thought it was cool, something to brag about in the Hamptons.” She paused to drink her sake and a thought struck her. “I think their attitudes changed after 9/11.”

  “Theirs and everyone else's,” I said. I knew there was a reason why I was still doing this gig and I'd just been reminded of it. I glanced outside. The snowflakes were settling onto the vehicles out in the street like goose down after a pillow fight.

  A man appeared to detach himself from the moving press of people shuffling along the sidewalk. He stepped into the sushi bar and launched a smile at me that could have come from a Tommy Hilfiger catalog. I was about to tell him he'd confused me with someone else when he said, “Hey, I knew I'd find you guys here!”

  “Bradley!” exclaimed Durban. She spun around on her stool a little too quick when she heard his voice, like she'd been caught in the act. It didn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out who Bradley was. I wondered why he'd turned up after Durban had given him the brush-off. Maybe he didn't trust her. Maybe he wasn't as vacuous as he looked. Bradley was impeccably dressed in a black Brooks Brothers coat with a bronze silk scarf tucked inside the lapels. He wore the arrogance of an Ivy League fraternity house like aftershave. I just knew we'd get along—not. He dusted the snowflakes off his shoulders and sleeves and JFK-style light brown hair, then unbuttoned his coat.

  “Got a drink there for me, Shell?” he said, avoiding any overt display of affection for his mistress. I wondered how he'd behave if he knew I knew. “So, you must be Special Agent Vincent Cooper. Good to meet you. Bradley Chalmers. I'm with State.”

  Sure you are, Brad.

  He held out his hand to shake. His white fingers were cold and wet, like pieces of sashimi.

  “Call me Vin,” I said, playing along.

  “So, how do you like Japan, Vin? It'd be nice, only there's so many Japanese, right?” He smiled at his own banality.

  “Yeah, it's nice,” I agreed. It occurred to me that someone upstairs must have been listening, for a change. Here was my diversion. Whether I liked the guy or not, Durban's boyfriend and boss was my excuse to exit, stage left. “Well…” I said.

  “Hey, where're you going?” Durban said with a frown.

  “Yeah, c'mon,” said Prince Chalmers with zero conviction, “you can't leave now.”

  “Appreciate the hospitality, folks,” I said, “but I got a report to write.” The requirement to keep on top of the paperwork was something everyone working for Uncle Sam understood, paperwork being a monster with an insatiable appetite for the world's forests. I caught a look from Michelle while the karaoke racket distracted her lover boss. It was the slightest pursing of those lips, the raising of an eyebrow and the suggestion of a shrug. It said, I'll shake this loser and then you and I can go wring some fun outta this town. Although I could have gotten it wrong and it might have been just plain, See you. I stood and the blood rushed to my feet, leaving my brain bobbing in a high-water mark of sake. I swayed a little.

  “You want me to get you a cab?” asked Durban.

  “No, I can manage.” I took a moment to center the bubble between the two black lines in my head before attempting further movement.

  “I've arranged to have you picked up at your hotel at oh-six-thirty by a cruiser,” she informed me.

  “Got it,” I said.

  “You know where you want to go?”

  I glanced outside. In the space of a few minutes, the snowfall had turned to blizzard. “Jamaica,” I said. “Say sayonara to Brady for me.”

  “Bradley,” she corrected me, her hand on my forearm.

  “Him, too.” I waved and headed for the sidewalk. I felt happy that something with Durban didn't get the chance to start… OK, maybe I'd feel happy about it in the morning.

  FIVE

  My body was still running on D.C. time, which explained why I didn't sleep much, and why at 0200 hours I felt like breaking for lunch. I watched a kung fu movie in my room and killed time till dawn reading over the briefing notes. Nothing stood out, and so my mind wandered to other more pressing topics such as replaying the last conversation I'd had with Anna. We were going nowhere, and so now we could go nowhere alone, without the inconvenience of having each other along for the ride.

  I went to breakfast early. The buffet was deserted, a rare occurrence anywhere in Japan. I ate enough bacon to bring on colon cancer, plus two eggs, a couple of sausages, two hash browns, toast, and a whole cantaloupe. If I could go till dinner without having to face the local cuisine, the day's major mission was accomplished. I ate a cinnamon pastry as I rolled out into the foyer.

  A police cruiser waited out beyond the end of a narrow strip of red carpet embossed with the Hilton's logo. Snow slush clumped across the vehicle's trunk, roof, and hood. The driver's window was opaque with water and mist. The window slid down and I got a wave. “Go ahead, make my day,” the now familiar cop said with a smile. I could have slugged the greeting out of the park, but I let it go. All I'd get back would be a blank look anyway, and what would be the fun in that?

  The rear door sprang open. I tossed in my jacket and climbed after it. I'd need the jacket. It was still only just a couple of degrees above freezing. The cold immediately found its way through the scar tissue I'd accumulated in recent years from all the bullet and shrapnel wounds.

  “Morning,” said Durb
an with the kind of singsong good cheer that makes me want to punch people, as she licked the froth off the underside of a lid of a cappuccino-to-go. “How'd you sleep?”

  Alone. “Fine, thanks. You stay out late?”

  “No. Bradley had to get home. One of his kids was having a birthday.” She shrugged as if to say, Shit happens. It did and, no thanks to her, a good chunk of it was happening to Chalmers's family. And sooner or later it would blow back on Michelle Durban. Her situation vaguely reminded me of my own marital gumbo. In the sober light of day, the CIA woman had lost a lot of her gloss, but I wasn't here to moralize, let alone judge, so I put her private life out of my mind.

  We meandered through the brown slurpee that the streets of Tokyo had become, pushing through the combination of snow-melt and grit, the tires throwing up a bow wave of slush. And then we were on the freeway between Tokyo and Yokohama, an impressive multilane strip of concrete seemingly held aloft by the roofs of the development that filled the space between the two cities. Whoever coined the phrase “Nature abhors a vacuum” must have seen this place.

  Our cop chauffeur settled down to a cruise below the speed limit, I assumed to avoid any ice patches. Our speed must have annoyed the surrounding traffic, none of which passed us or honked. All super polite. Durban and I sat in silence. I watched the urban sprawl roll by when the opacity of the window cleared enough to allow it, and listened to the incomprehensible chatter coming over the comms. It occurred to me that there weren't many countries left in the world untouched by the English language, but this was one of them. The only words I recognized here were familiar brand names paraded on endless billboards. Like Durban, these signs didn't seem to hold the same attraction when they weren't all lit up for the night.

  The port of Yokohama appeared suddenly when the curtain of mist parted in front of a sky of beaten lead. The water beneath it had the color of wet coal. Durban passed a yellow Post-it note through the steel mesh to the cop and the two exchanged a bunch of staccato words that sounded like the linguistic equivalent of carpet burn. I assumed the Post-it held our intended destination, because the driver checked it several times before punching buttons on the vehicle's navigation system. We turned off the main road and into the docks, reduced to a crawl because of ice. A car had fishtailed off the road and had somehow come to rest with the front end hanging out over the water. It teetered back and forth, balancing unsteadily. Emergency vehicles clustered around it, their strobe lights bouncing off the surrounding concrete like little electric shocks. Uniformed people waved their arms around, small white clouds in front of their mouths. Our driver ignored the scene and drove slowly on. We eventually pulled onto a pier and slid sideways down a small incline, the wheels losing traction on the ice, before pulling up next to a ship. It moved ever so slightly beside the pier like it was alive, breathing, the movement only perceptible against the stillness of a vast gray warehouse on the far side of the bay.

  I stepped out of the vehicle and felt my scrotum contract, testicles beating a strategic withdrawal into the warmth of my guts. I reached for my jacket. I was right about needing it. The uniform stayed with the vehicle, stamping his feet and clapping his hands, making little bows while Durban and I walked carefully across the ice to the gangway. The tips of my ears and nose already burned with cold, and my breath steamed. I pulled a pair of leather gloves from a side pocket and put them on.

  Durban took the gangway first, steadying herself on the incline with a gloved hand on the railing. Two black shapes met her as she stepped on deck. Introductions were well under way when I caught up.

  “Professor Sean Boyle,” said a man I knew from briefing notes to be fourteen years my senior. The cold burnished perfect pink circles on his shaved cheeks.

  We shook gloves and I said, “Special Agent Vincent Cooper.”

  A second man said, “Moritzio Abrutto, ship's master.” According to those briefing notes, he was American, as were most of the crew. The ship was leased to Moreton Genetics, the large U.S. firm which employed Professor Boyle and the late Doctor Tanaka. Abrutto was blond and fair-skinned. “Come inside,” he said, leading the way through a hatch, warm yellow light beckoning from within.

  The air inside the ship smelled of diesel and bacon. We followed the ship's master and Professor Boyle into a reasonably large area with bench seats on either side of a couple of tables. The mess. Photos on the walls showed various people, mostly men and mostly bare-chested, proudly holding various objects for the camera that could have been anything from offal to placenta. Life recovered from the deepest oceans, I assumed. Nearly all the photos were signed. I recognized the subjects in one as being Boyle and Tanaka. Boyle was bearded, and they stood together on the ship's rear deck in tropical sunlight. Both men had their hands on their hips, ready for action. I bent toward the photo to take a closer look.

  “A great man,” said Professor Boyle behind me. “I'm missing him already.” He peeled out of his jacket. “That photo was taken a year and a half ago, cruising up the southern tip of the island of Honshu. We were heading for the Trench.”

  “The Japan Trench?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said the professor. “Our first expedition to these waters.”

  “The one just concluded was your second?”

  “Third.”

  Three times. I hadn't known that. Perhaps the fact that Boyle and Tanaka had been on the Natusima several times before wasn't significant, but it reminded me that while the brief I'd been given was pretty good, there were still holes in it.

  “Can I offer you people anything to eat or drink?” Boyle inquired.

  “Not for me,” I said, having eaten twice my body weight for breakfast.

  “No thanks,” said Durban.

  “Take your coats off and have a seat. Get comfortable,” said the master, taking his own advice. The rest of us followed his lead.

  “So, Agent Cooper,” said Boyle as he slid in behind the table, “how can we help you with your investigation?”

  “I'm not really investigating,” I replied. “I'm just prepping the DoD's files for closure.”

  The professor locked his fingers in front of him. “Well, then, what would you like to know?”

  “Before you start, if you have no objection… ?” I placed a digital recorder on the table and switched it on. Its red LED winked, letting me know it was recording.

  “No, that's fine,” said Boyle with a dismissive wave of his hand.

  “I've already read your statement, Professor,” I said. “Is there anything you could add to it? Anything that has come to mind since you made it?”

  The professor shook his head. “The truth is, Agent Cooper, I've tried my best to forget about the whole unpleasant episode. So, the answer to that is no, nothing.”

  “If you don't mind, would you go through events on that night again, anyway?”

  The professor glanced at his watch. “If you think it'll help.”

  I nodded, fixing an expression of understanding on my face to put him at ease. Boyle didn't look much like a professor, but only because I believe all professors should look like Albert Einstein on a bad hair day. Boyle's, by the way, was thick and straight, and it was also unnaturally blue-black. Dyed. I guessed he was more self-conscious about gray hair than he was about appearing to wear a mixing bowl on his head. He had the appearance of a severe monk, the Spanish Inquisition kind, and I could easily imagine him lighting bonfires. But, as I said, first impressions can be misleading.

  The written brief told me Professor Sean Boyle was forty-eight and that his parents had emigrated to the U.S. from Ireland when he was four. His face was intelligent and his dark eyes glittered with intensity beneath bushy black brows. His skin was pale all over, except for the glow on his cheeks induced by the cold. His lips were on the thin side, and there were vague acne scars on his neck. At a guess I'd have said he spent more time peering through microscopes than he did power-lifting and drinking protein shakes. He was also a valuable defense asset, according to C
aptain Schaeffer, and I had been ordered not to piss him off. I was to tread lightly, which I had every intention of doing.

  Boyle glanced at his watch a second time. So, he had somewhere he'd rather be. Him and me both. “I'm sorry for asking you to be here today, Professor. I know you're anxious to get away and I won't keep you a moment longer than necessary.”

  “That's okay,” he said. “I still had things to attend to on board. Dr. Tanaka and I collected a number of previously unrecorded specimens. I'm anxious to get them properly secured for the flight home.”

  “Well, thank you anyway, sir,” I said, walking on tippy-toes as ordered.

  The professor picked at a cigarette burn on the tabletop. “We'd been diving on the Trench for a week in the submersible.”

  “Who's we?” I asked.

  “The doctor and I, and a technician.”

  “Is the technician still on board?”

  “Yep,” said Abrutto. “We'll catch up with him when you're done here.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Sorry to interrupt, Professor. You were saying?”

  “We had perfect weather, tides, and currents, and because of all that had managed to complete the dive phase ahead of schedule, which was fortunate because we had weather coming down on us.”

  The master agreed with a nod.

  “We were having a bit of a celebration,” continued Boyle. “Hideo was drinking, and I'd never seen him do that before—drink.”

  “What was he drinking?” I asked.

  “Scotch. We only had that and sake on board.”

  “Do you know how much he drank?”

  “Enough, obviously, though I didn't realize it at the time. I topped his glass up maybe twice, I think. As you may or may not know, Agent Cooper, many Asian people don't have the gene that allows them to metabolize alcohol effectively.”

  I nodded. Yeah, I was aware of the supposed Asian intolerance of booze. I wasn't aware it had become established fact. “So you had never seen Dr. Tanaka drunk before?”