Her small body was shaking in my embrace. She began to cry.
For a long moment we stood there. I wondered if I was dreaming. I couldn’t believe this was actually happening to me, to us, but Niki in my arms was so real.
She turned her face, wet with tears, up at me and I leaned over to kiss her, but she broke away and blurted, “No. I’m so sorry. I actually don’t know a thing about you. Perhaps I shouldn’t.”
I wanted to shout out loud, “I have never stopped being yours, even though I never believed it was at all possible. I have had no other love since you.”
But I couldn’t say anything. Once again I was tongue-tied and awkward, and I didn’t know what I should say, or what I could tell her and do with her in my peculiar situation here. Niki wiped away her tears and tidied her hair, and then said just one word, “Come,” as she began walking away.
When we emerged from the passageway she said, “Wait here. I’ll call you if I need you.” We were next to the main library on the campus, a modern two-storey building faced with grey stone slabs and glass windows that protruded from the walls.
“No. I’m coming with you,” I said and followed her to the nearby Faculty of Arts and Science, a combination that I had not yet understood. The modern structure, at 100 George Street, was five storeys high with large windows. Inside, we took a corridor that led us to a wide glass door with the words “Departments & Administration” on it. It struck me as an odd term.
“I’ll go in by myself,” said Niki, quietly but firmly, pointing to a nearby cafeteria where I should wait for her.
As a confirmed coffee aficionado, and a freezing one, I gladly ordered a cup and sat down in one of the black leather armchairs that were placed around the little tables. I regretted not having thought of ordering coffee for her, but before I could return to the counter, or even take a sip from mine, she appeared with a rolled up diploma and a sheaf of transcripts. She asked nothing and said nothing as she handed them to me in a rather formal manner. And then she gave me her hand and said, “I suppose you can find your way out without my help.”
“Niki … when do you finish work?” were all the words I could find.
“At four.”
“Where should I wait?”
“Be in the lobby of the Four Seasons at seven.”
“I’ll be there.”
And she walked away, looking ethereal and as if she was walking on water. I watched her, stunned, until she vanished into the gloom in the corridor. Once again, I had allowed her to walk away. She had come back into my life again so abruptly, so similarly to our first encounter, that all the assertiveness I had developed, all those days and nights during which I had trained to take control of situations and to adapt them to suit myself, had melted away the moment she approached me, again, just like then, offering effective assistance and then disappearing.
But we had fixed a meeting for the evening. And I knew where she worked. This time I would not let her get away from me. But it had all been too sudden, and the surrounding circumstances were really not ideal.
Although getting Ron Friedlich’s paperwork was a simple mission, many major operations have fallen through when a routine task like this failed, and many troubles have ensued. If I’d been asked to provide ID before obtaining the material, if someone’s suspicions had been aroused and the university security people called in and only a superficial investigation made, there would be no documentation for my cover, and Ron’s disappearance would have been linked with us. Who knows what diplomatic and other difficulties would have arisen – not to mention my own plight. I had my good fortune to thank for producing Niki at precisely the right moment, for her not asking any questions and simply performing this service for me. It probably could have got her into trouble and perhaps even cost her her post in the university. But I had a job to do and this wasn’t the time to pursue a courtship. The documents I was carrying suddenly seemed red hot. I had to get rid of them right away. I went to a post office in a nearby building and after photographing the papers, I put them in a padded envelope and mailed it to one of our safe addresses in Canada, from which it would find its way to the Office via undercover personnel.
I was curious to know what Ron had studied, and before I transmitted the pictures to Israel as backup for the original documents, I took a look at them on the screen of my camera. The courses he had taken seemed diverse and not particularly challenging. Among them were Environment and Behaviour, Forest Conservation Science, and Nutritional Science, which fell under the heading Life Sciences. There were also Humanities courses, including American Studies, Aboriginal Studies and Buddhism, as well as social sciences courses, including Anthropology, Canadian Studies – I couldn’t fathom why that was separate from American Studies – and others that I assumed did not demand too much of an effort, like Environmental Ethics, and Human Geography. There was clearly a common factor, concern with the Earth and culture, and another common factor was the grades – all were average or lower.
Later on I realized why. There was a whole set of fairly high grades under the heading “Varsity Blues”, which meant nothing to me. But the following day, when I left the hotel, I noticed a sign saying “Varsity Blues Football Team” outside a sports stadium right across the road. I realized that this was what Toronto University’s sports teams were called, and that Ron had apparently made his life easier by accumulating credits for his performance and training on the football squad.
At first I tended to belittle all this, but then I thought that his choice was not all that different from my decision to study art. The guy had a talent for sports and he focused on what interested him and did the necessary minimum of everything else; or perhaps not the minimum – he studied precisely what he wanted to study and invested precisely the time and energy he wanted to invest. “Ron the Jock” seemed to have taken life quite easily. Hats off to you, my dear deceased double.
The Four Seasons was a short walk away from the Town Inn Suites, but after showering, shaving and even applying some aftershave lotion, which I didn’t usually do, and donning for the first time the suit I had brought with me, I decided to take a cab. The Pakistani driver pulled a face when he realized it was just a quick hop, but was grateful when I let him keep all the change. He spent the short time trying to find out where I was from. I asked where he was from. “I’m from here,” he said. “In Toronto everyone’s from Toronto.” “So am I from here,” I said, concluding our brief conversation. At six o’clock I was already in the hotel lobby.
I couldn’t really settle down in the luxurious space, a separate structure from the multi-storey hotel. There were a lot of designer stores around a large marble floor with a thick, expensive-looking carpet in the middle. A few stairs led to a seating area with several identical clusters of a sofa and two chairs around a table, all close to a counter with a selection of pastries and cakes, and a waiter behind the counter. A bad place for a secret meeting, and not exactly right for a romantic rendezvous either. You couldn’t sit there without ordering something but I had no appetite. I spent most of the hour in the shops, amazed anew each time by the price tags and by the fact that there must be people prepared to pay so much for the leather and fur coats, handbags, and items of jewellery, all of which seemed to me to be entirely superfluous.
What did I think would happen now? I asked myself. What did I want to happen? I corrected the question. Of course I couldn’t know, because I knew nothing about Niki. She may be married, married with kids. And even if she were single, I was here on a mission, I would have to leave soon, and I would not be able to tell her why or where. There was no chance here for a normal relationship. And even if there were, what did I feel about her?
In the years that had gone by, I thought I had overcome the magic, the craziness, the spell that had gripped me during our previous encounter. “Eruption” may be a better word. Something that had occurred suddenly and powerfully, without any explanation that I could articulate. I knew very well that no relations
hip of mine, pre- or post-Niki, had taken me to the heights of excitement that she had elicited in me, and no night had been anything like the night of wild sensuality I’d had with her. But then I’d been on my post-army travels, borne upon a euphoric wave of freedom from military discipline, open to such a crazy adventure. Since then I had become more settled in my ways. I would probably not be able to feel like that again. Not even about the same woman. For years I had not even been searching for anything like those feelings. I had been seeking a woman I could like and live with, and I had found someone like that, but she was one of the thousand victims of the Second Intifada. What seeing Niki again had aroused in me was mainly confusion, I decided. Emotions apparently take longer to awaken, and it was not certain that what a pretty, girlish figure aroused in a twenty-odd year old guy would work the same way when he was pushing thirty. She, I saw, had hardly changed. I, on the other hand, was about twenty pounds heavier. I would probably not turn her on the way I had then, if I had turned her on, that is. She was the one who cut me out of her life and, when that didn’t go smoothly, she had simply disappeared.
Just before seven, I went up into the sitting area, took a chair facing the entrance, ordered a coffee and waited expectantly.
All of the reservations that had gone through my mind melted away the second Niki entered the lobby. She was wearing the same dark blue dress she had worn that night in Asakusa, with a fur coat now covering her bare back. She must have been wearing high heels because she looked quite tall. My heart almost stopped beating. I stood up to welcome her as she came towards me with those small steps of hers. Her hair was gathered at the back, her face was white and a line of black lengthened her eyes. She was stunning. This was the most beautiful woman I’d ever laid eyes on. The excitement that overcame me was stronger than I was. I knew people were watching us. I knew it wasn’t done, but I couldn’t stop myself. I took hold of her head, her high cheekbones cupped in the palms of my hands, bent over her and kissed her lips. I meant it to be a long kiss, oblivious to everything, but she gave my lip a quick, hard bite and when I pulled my head back, surprised and hurt, she said, “Good evening to you too,” her expression icy cold.
Embarrassed, I put out my hand to shake hers, but Niki ignored even that formality and sat down.
“What exactly do you think you are doing?” she asked quietly.
What exactly was I thinking? That I could walk up to a near stranger, not knowing anything about what had happened to her since that far off night in the Tokyo love hotel and kiss her as if she was still mine? The plain truth is that I didn’t think. I simply did not think, and that’s what I told her: I sat on the sofa and she was on one of the chairs, our knees not quite touching. The waiter, who must have witnessed the entire scene, came over. Niki ordered a cocktail I’d never heard of and I said I’d make do with my coffee.
“Please see this as just an ordinary date,” she said when the waiter left us. “We had better get to know each other a bit, no?”
My insides quaked. It wasn’t a “yes” – she had not fallen into my arms again as if she’d been waiting for me all these years. But neither was it a “no” – here she was, gorgeous, made-up, well groomed. There was a “perhaps” that fluctuated in my mind between the possibility that she was here out of good manners, like a woman meeting up with an old friend, and the possibility that she was contemplating me as a potential partner. Like an ordinary date. Despite her momentary breakdown in my arms in the dimly-lit university passageway, what was now occurring would not simply close the wide-open gap that had been left between us in the nightclub in Tokyo. I would have to adjust myself to this, but my insides were quaking so deeply that I knew my feelings were coming directly from that place and time, skipping over the almost ten years that had elapsed since then.
For the next hour, we told each other about our lives over that decade, stories that were marked mainly by what had been missing: love. I told her about art school, my painting, teaching, relationships in which I’d found no meaning, journeys around the world that skirted Japan, carefully avoiding her magnetic field, until Dolly appeared. How I had thought I could make a life with her, without being deeply in love. My description of her death made Niki’s tears flow freely, while my eyes remained dry. That’s where I ended my story.
Niki told me her life had changed abruptly after that night, but she didn’t want to go into details about why and how. She’d returned to her parents’ home and her father was disappointed because he’d hoped she would be the magnet that would draw the family back to Japan. She tried to keep up the samurai culture here in Toronto by persevering at her judo and swordplay training at a Japanese centre, and she was also teaching a course in calligraphy. After a while she’d understood that she couldn’t go on living with her parents, moved out, and enrolled at the university to study literature and editing. To make a living, she’d taken the low-level job at Trinity College and she also worked as a reader for a small publishing house, as well as doing occasional editing jobs.
“Mostly, I like editing romantic novels,” she said with a shy little smile. “There are so many ways to love.”
“What about men?” I asked rather gruffly.
Niki sighed.
“Some. But Canadians.”
The question mark on my face made her finish the sentence: just as she had not come to terms with the stupid traditional machismo that Japanese males couldn’t shake off, and which made it impossible for them to accept her for what she was, so she also could not reconcile herself to the overly polite men of Canada, who were scared of women like her. Apparently, I fit in exactly between the two types. She said she’d had one boyfriend who reminded her very much of me, and my heart skipped a beat: I even thought that she was watching me for a reaction but at no point did she ask me why I wanted Ron Friedlich’s documents.
Without noticing it, our knees touched and then our legs were entangled and once again I had to ask, “Your place or mine” and this time she said, “Either” and we left the Four Seasons hugging into the cold night and made our way to my warm hotel room.
Niki smiled at the mess and my hurried attempt to tidy it up, and said, “Anyway it’s going to be a mess again soon.” Her eyes, still shining with a suppressed smile, soon became the crazed predatory eyes of the alley cat, eyes the like of which I had seen in no other human but her, as all those years of pent up yearning and lust flooded together into a single tempestuous night.
6.
The Morning After
THE DILEMMA I’D wanted to spare myself hit me hard next morning. What was I to do now? What was I to do after the most exciting night of love I’d had since the last time with Niki? Actually, there hadn’t been a night since then that I could call a night of love. I had simply never been in love, even if the sex was good, and even if I felt affection for the woman I was with, as I did mainly with Dolly. There had been nothing like the spate of feelings for Niki that rushed through me when the dam inside my breast finally broke.
Even when it seemed that there were no more emotions to emerge from the depths of my heart, a whole spectrum of sensations kept on welling up while Niki told me, tears streaming from her eyes, what had happened after I was thrown out of the club in Tokyo. My taxi had driven away, and the moment after I hurled my drawings out of the window one of the guards shoved them into Niki’s hands, and another placed her coat around her shoulders. There was a brief, harsh exchange of words in Japanese, someone barred her from going back into the club, and a few minutes later a black Lexus sedan drew up. She was pushed in and a guard sitting next to her said only, “Your apartment.” Niki told them where it was, realizing she was in trouble. The missing top part of the driver’s little finger left her in no doubt as to whose hands she was in.
She was given five minutes to pack her things under close watch. Her suitcase and two open bags were put in the boot of the Lexus and, with her and the guard in the backseat, it took off. No one said a word to her during the rest of the journ
ey of hundreds of miles all the way to the city of Kyoto, where they arrived at first light. The car stopped in a narrow alley lined with old houses, and Niki had no problem knowing where she was: Gion, the city’s geisha district. Another guard was waiting at the doorway of one of the houses, and after some words of welcome and perfunctory bows, as required by the rules of etiquette, she was led to a room at the back of the house. It was here that she was to begin the new chapter in her life as a hostess. Her cell phone was taken away. On the futon mattress on the polished wooden floor her new outfit was laid out. The madam of the house stood over her as Niki stripped off her old identity and replaced it with a new one.
“The clients were mostly local men,” Niki told me. “I was still a kind of traditional hostess, something like a warm-up act before or instead of the actual geisha. It was more or less the same kind of work as in Tokyo; all they wanted was to distance me from you.”
Scared and anxious, she did what she was told to do for a few months before she dared to run away, from Kyoto to nearby Osaka, where she took the first flight to Canada.
I felt terrible. Niki’s Japanese dream had been wrecked by my infantile and idiotic behaviour. If I could only turn back the clock. … But I didn’t really want to do that. I was here with the sobbing Niki in my arms, and I was as utterly in love as I could be.
So, what was I to do now?
On the face of it, the answer was plain, if only we’d been in a normal situation. A couple of lovers who’d lost each other and had just found each other again would stay together and do what they felt like doing. He’d paint, she’d edit romantic novels. But like the yakuza with the truncated finger who’d taken Niki from Tokyo to Kyoto, I felt Udi, my bulky controller, breathing down the back of my neck. I knew no one would force me to do anything if I chose Niki. I wouldn’t be pushed into a black Lexus and whisked away in the dark of night to another city. It was the yakuza in me that didn’t allow me to follow this dream, the most natural dream that any young guy and young girl could – and should – dream together. So, what was I to do?
Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller Page 14
