Death in the Face

by Craig McDonald

  ***

  Béla Gustav Herczog’s health facility was situated in the flashy, tawdry midst of a kind of red-light district of twisting, narrow alleys and mean-looking storefronts where actual felines lazed in front of the cat houses.

  The smell of sulfur hung nastily over at least this part of the city that was studded with bathhouses offering variously hot water, sand, sulfur or mud baths—a cloying, smelly variety of so-called “onsens.”

  Hector thought he might be days getting the rotten-egg smell out of his nose and perhaps even weeks washing it from his clothes.

  According to Tiger, in the bathhouses, men and women bathed nude together in the gray-brown ooze of the smoking pools.

  Irresistibly, Hector imagined Brinke, who was always something of a libertine or at least a kind of hedonistic adventurer, moving naked among these Asian strangers—her pale, long and curvy body a kind of wonderment to the native bathers.

  Would Brinke have taken an Asian lover here or there, male or female?

  Quite probably, and quite probably both, Hector decided.

  It occurred to him that he wasn’t even sure when she had actually made her passage through this place.

  Had Brinke sampled Beppu’s wicked offerings before she met Hector? Or had it perhaps instead happened between February and December 1924—their near year apart? During that frustrating period when Brinke was on the run, rebuilding her life and establishing a new identity, hiding from French police who did not quite believe the fiction of her apparent death in the frozen Seine on a long-ago February night.

  Brinke had also been running from a malevolent female British mystery writer dedicated to her very real destruction—a terrible woman who also had not quite fallen for that very strategic “murder” Brinke had engineered.

  His head once more filled with thoughts of his first wife, Hector distractedly toured the grounds of the facility with Ian. For the most part, it seemed to present itself as a kind of honest spa or clinic, although the smell of all that sulfur was now truly getting to Hector—threatening to make him at least sick to his stomach.

  Béla Gustav Herczog’s dwelling place sat at the far eastern edge of the facility, its turreted, multi-story upper reaches just visible above the treetops.

  It was far enough away from the sulfur pits to perhaps be spared some of the stench. Hector couldn’t imagine even perpetual proximity eased one’s awareness of the horrible stench—it was simply too relentlessly overpowering.

  There were no obvious paths or signs pointing the way to Herczog’s castle—for that was surly what it was, and very much modeled in the Eastern mode.

  At last feeling they had the landscape of the clinic and castle grounds down —a kind of working map in their heads—Ian and Hector wandered over to a consultation house to see about perhaps booking a massage or maybe even enjoying something a bit more “robust” as Ian put it. Particularly since it seemed among the services offered was something called “soapland,” a mysterious phrase—enigmatic, at least to Hector—that put a wicked smile on Ian’s face. “I’ve heard of these,” he said, clearly delighted. “We simply mustn’t pass it up now that we know it’s an option, Hector.”

  But fate wasn’t on Ian’s side this day—or, to be more specific, it seemed that Ian’s heart simply wasn’t in the carnal challenge, so to speak.

  Once he provided an honest accounting of his recent heart attack—that admission taken with his outward appearance and the distressing, impossible-to-disguise pallor that further bespoke his failing body’s frailty—Ian was very regretfully informed by a smallish, clear-skinned young Japanese woman that she was so very sorry not to be able to “service” Ian.

  Hector, while feeling sorry and upset for his friend, found himself wondering whether their regretful spa consultant had enough command of the English language to grasp the potential spectrum of meaning in her use of the phrase, “service.”

  Hector, on the other hand, was cleared for the full service, if he wanted to pony up the necessary yen.

  Ian smiled ruefully and shook his head. He whispered in Hector’s ear, “Clearly, the great bad man is cowering off behind his walls somewhere, and this clinic is hardly the equivalent of my little place atop my Piz where Blofeld makes his lair in the coming Bond you recently read. And, anyway, I took a mud bath in Vegas once to research the experience for Diamonds Are Forever. It was a rather horrid experience I’ll confess now, although, admittedly, it lacked the scenery and sensory experience you’re promised, even with this wretched smell of rotten eggs hanging so sourly in the air. Go off and enjoy yourself, Hector, and try very hard not to catch anything Western science can yet cure. I’ll meet up with you at the hotel later. Will this stand as our plan?”

  Hector wasn’t so sure about whether or not he’d be enjoying the full “service” to use their consultant’s word, but he did entertain the possibility that sitting in the hot ooze might take some of the pain out of his still rather sore body.

  The bruises had faded to near nothing, but the beating he’d sustained so many days ago—and the slightly cracked ribs from the impact after the explosion at the airport—still dogged him with mild pain. Again, he rued the loss of his youthful self’s ability to bounce back from such traumas.

  Mostly though, he was very relieved Ian’s vanity wasn’t pushing him to insist upon a mud bath that might spike his heart rate and at last give Ian’s much-talked-about “Iron Crab” its final, fatal pass at the British author’s diseased heart.

  “I’ll try to be back no later than seven,” Hector said. “We’ll get some good sake and a meal, then we’ll call our poet friend and insist upon a rendezvous. At very least, tomorrow, regardless of anything else the world may throw at us, I’m claiming Brinke’s writings from that son of a bitch. That’s my promise and present to myself and this poet had no right to mix up in that.”

  They shook hands and, only half-comprehending what he was agreeing to, Hector handed over the money to the pretty Asian consultant.

  He was directed through a rustic wooden door. As he followed the indicated path to the bathhouse, Hector gave it some more thought: It had been a long and sorry time since he’d paid for sex—well, one was always paying for sex in some way, if one looked at it in a certain cynical light. But Hector hadn’t paid outright for the service in a very, very long time, and those times that he had done so, the experience hadn’t been even particularly good. Maybe because, to invoke that phrase again, his heart simply hadn’t been in the act and neither had the woman’s.

  But he told himself that this time the money was paid and what he let himself derive from that compact would be his own choice and one made in the moment. If it amounted to simply a hot bath in this smelly ooze and a hosing off afterward—maybe some caressing hands or bare feet walking on his aching back—all of that he would accept and savor as he could.

  As an old man greeted him and he exchanged his shoes for slippers at the door, Hector told himself it really didn’t have to be more than that simple bath and maybe a massage, not at all.

  ***

  The women who was to care for him was named Kazaori, which he, was told, translated into something along the lines of “Leaning in the Wind.”

  She had virtually no English, but the other woman who had taken his money assured him there would be little risk of misunderstanding and, really, it was just best if he put himself in Kazaori’s hands and to know that by the end of their time together, Hector was guaranteed to feel quite relaxed and, her words, feeling “very much soothed.”

  The girl was a kind of revelation—petite, pretty, and certainly no more than twenty-five or twenty-six. She was also paid for, in full, as he reminded himself.

  At his age, one never knew how many fine young ladies lay in store along life’s narrowing, increasingly unpromising road.

  Hector’s earlier resolve to sanguinely bypass sex had already fled as the pretty young thing led him to their private bath area and said simply, “He is to undress,
please.”

  She pantomimed the act of stripping and then she undertook that process herself, slipping out of a silk kimono—her only clothing.

  Hector briefly turned as if shy, but really just to hide his guns in his coat pockets before continuing to strip himself.

  When he was naked too, the lovely Kazaori proceeded to bathe him, head to toe.

  After, she had him move to a tub where she joined him, sitting facing him as her hand drifted under the water to grasp him, stroking him for a time, then, as she moved to kiss him there, Hector shifted so she wouldn’t have to have her face touch the water.

  So far, their language barrier, as promised, was little impediment to what Ian might have described as their robust interactions.

  Correctly sensing he was close to climaxing, Kazaori stopped and they rose together from the water. She next directed him to move to an air mattress on the floor. There, she covered them both with a slick lubricant—some concoction she called “nuru gel.”

  Kazaori preceded to rub up against and slide over Hector’s body, front and back, using her breasts and other private areas to massage all the various bits of him.

  Again, as she sensed she might push him over the edge, she once more bathed Hector and then herself. After toweling off, she gave him a long, lingering massage before putting a condom on him and at last riding him to an aching climax.

  Kazaori, too, seemed to reach the same kind of bliss, but as she was a professional, Hector wasn’t quite sure if it was an actual “little death” or instead a blessedly convincing bit of play-acting to spare an aging gaijin’s ego.

  She said in English, “Happy end, yes?”

  The writer in him rebelled at the concept but he smiled and said, “Very happy, yes.”

  When he had more or less recovered, she kissed Hector with a feather-brush of budding lips on his mouth, then washed him a last time and led him to another room where she held his hand as he slowly lowered himself into a mud pit.

  She pointed at a clock on the wall to indicate when she would return for him—in about fifteen minutes. She said she would again wash him off upon her return, help him to dress and then send him on his way back into the world feeling she “most sincerely” hoped, as something like a “new man.”

  As he sat sweating in the hot mud, feeling it ooze uncomfortably into various crevices and cracks and but also undeniably at last drawing some of the stubborn aches and faint pains from his abused bones, Hector decided it might be a real act of will to stay in the hot mud for the full fifteen minutes.

  He could feel his heart beginning to race a bit and raised himself a bit to get his heart and lungs above the hot and steaming surface of the mud.

  But it proved he didn’t need to worry about sticking it out for the entire quarter hour.

  After just less than five minutes, two hulking Japanese men in ill-fitting suits entered Hector’s private mud bath and pointed at the shower with Hector’s Walther.

  One of the giant men—both, Hector had already decided, were surely current or recently retired-Sumo—pointed at the shower stall and said, “Wash up, fast, then put this on.” The big man held up a black kimono that he then tossed onto a shelf.

  Hector tried to brass it out. He said, “Sorry, but there’s clearly a misunderstanding of some kind. Kazaori promised she’s coming back to—”

  A curt nod of a bullet-like head on thick neck cut him off. “No,” the big Japanese man said. “That’s not how it is, of course. You will not see her again.” His English was quite assured.

  The giant stranger said, “Just please stop wasting time, Mr. Lassiter. Stalling buys you nothing. An important man wants to see you. He is a man who doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

  4 / The Root of All Evil

  The two imposing, obese men led Hector into a large, traditional Japanese room with facing, sliding walls currently pushed open to afford a pretty view of the gardens and the lightly-falling and sweet-smelling rain. He’d been right about that much—the sulfur smell didn’t reach the main living quarters, or at least it didn’t on this rainy night.

  As he stood barefoot in his kimono, flanked by the two big men, Hector sized them up again. He judged that even in his prime he wouldn’t have stood a chance against one of the leviathans, let alone both—not in any hand-to-hand confrontation. One of the two topped out at six-five, easily.

  The other stood perhaps six-four. Despite the rolls of fat, Hector also sensed there was mature, substantial muscle underlying all that blubber.

  Hell, Hector wasn’t sure two or three well-placed bullets would stop either of these monsters in time to forestall serious damage to himself. And, anyway, he had no guns at the moment. He was still naked under the black silk kimono; the bundle of his clothes sat neatly folded on a black lacquered table on the far side of the room.

  That table: Hector looked around again for something, some item of décor or simply anything that might give insight to Béla Herczog.

  But the room was as neutral as some of the traditional hotel rooms or inns he’d experienced on this trip with Ian across Japan: Just a smattering of traditional prints of unremarkable Japanese scenes or settings. There was really nothing individual—nothing to provide insight—in the room at all.

  The soft sound of steps, then a tall, thin bald man in black pants and a black polo shirt entered the room. The man wore black slippers on his slightly pigeon-toed feet.

  The new man’s skin was of a sallow-brownish hue reminding Hector in a sad and pointed way of Ian’s unhealthy pallor.

  The skinny man’s naked scalp was veined over with blue and purple spider webs. His mouth was a sour slash—no prominent upper or lower lip. The eyes were deeply sunken into dark, wide-apart orbits and were pale gray, the irises surrounded all around by the whites of the eyes—rather like Mussolini’s appeared in photos when Il Duce was captured on film in moments of rage or spittle-spraying zeal.

  But it was the man’s withered right arm that captivated Hector’s pale blue eyes. The small and stunted arm barely came even with the man’s normal, unremarkable left elbow. Vestigial fingers dangled limply from under the edges of the loosely fitting right sleeve of the black polo shirt in a kind of repellent flipper. A birth defect? Something resulting from his birth mother’s exposure to some ancient chemical forerunner to Thalidomide, perhaps?

  Either way, Hector was glad to see that this man, at least, wasn’t particularly imposing, despite being more than a shade taller than Hector.

  A voice the author recognized from that phone call at the hotel days before said, “Mr. Lassiter. I’d really hoped we’d not come to this bitter, final place.”

  Hector smiled uncertainly and said, “Can we really be said to have come to anywhere? We haven’t even been properly introduced, Mr. Herczog. Listen, would you mind terribly if I was to—”

  The left hand rose, quieting Hector. “No, we’ll not waste time with any of that. I’d hoped at one point we might work together after a fashion. I’d hoped that you would at least cooperate and cheerfully hand over to me the materials related to the Flea Bomb. But then I began to gain access to your various dossiers via Haven Branch and so many others—the files kept on you by the British and by your own government secret forces. . . . Even by the French and the Russian secret services.”

  Herczog waved his good hand and shrugged. “After at last wading through all of these materials, I decided you will never bend to my will, not happily, nor will you ever do so constructively. That’s when I decided to try and eliminate you at the airport. It seemed prudent to simply and swiftly remove an inevitable complication. But that effort unfortunately failed. Then my associate, Miss Branch, begged me to let her try her little ruse with your mutual kidnapping. She was convinced she could manipulate you toward unwitting cooperation. That gambit, too, went lamentably awry, and when she should come under my hand again, as she inevitably will?” He drew his left hand across his neck. “I abhor ineptitude.”

  The man with the
withered right arm moved to a small wall cabinet and opened it. He pushed aside Hector’s bundle of clothes to make room and poured Satori over ice.

  Without offering Hector even the invitation of a possibly tongue-loosening drink—this was another very bad sign, a mortal harbinger, the novelist decided—the bald man said, “When Miss Branch failed with her melodramatic masked ruse in the garage, I made my little phone call and decided to try and motivate you through the simple and straightforward promise to kill your friends and former lovers if you didn’t agree to facilitate my will. I then sat back to wait and see what effect those far from idle threats would have.”

  Hector shrugged. “And I think we would have to agree that the jury is still out on all that, as I have done nothing but try to satisfy my curiosity about who you are, and to get a look at you and your operation here—doing so as a paying customer, I’d add. I’m hardly skulking around or hiding my identity toward some dark end. Not like you.”

  “Silence,” Herczog said, the whites again showing all the way around the pale gray eyes. “What you have done is to ferret out my identity, and then to dare to come straight into my keep. That portends enemy action and, based on your past escapades and a willingness to use lethal force when and how you see fit, I regard your presence here and now as clear indication of your intention to assassinate me in my own home.”

  The man gestured at Hector with his glass. He said sharply, “No, Mr. Lassiter, your intent and lethal threat are all too clear to me. You mean me harm, so I will simply kill you first. Mr. Fleming is tired and sick—I think it will not be terribly difficult for my Black Dragons to wrest from him the microfilm once it passes into his faltering hands. He also has a wife and a child whom I can threaten as easily as I threatened that Irish trash and that Mexican whore of yours back in California. So you see, Mr. Lassiter, you are now imminently expendable in my eyes. All actions have consequences and yours have gotten you killed today.”