by Gavin Black
I wanted to get through to Marla then in some way, to reach her where she was sitting on a bouncing train seat, but I knew it was no use. I’ve failed before to get through to people much closer to me. It’s not a knack I have.
Marla had trusted the Clynders, and perhaps that beach house in Kamakura had been her only real escape from loneliness for long enough. She met her child with them as kind of go-betweens.
Susie who was going to have an operation. Little lying smooth Susie, who liked my Martinis and had a contempt for her husband.
We were out of Shinagawa before anyone spoke.
“What do you know about the Clynders?” I asked Reggie.
That broke a kind of silence. We all stirred from privacy. Reggie brought out a gold case and we lit cigarettes, an uneasy syndicate of three brought together by circumstances.
“Clynder’s broke,” Reggie said. “Flat. Stony. It’s why he interested me a lot. He just isn’t selling motor bikes. And his standard of living isn’t modest. He should have blown up before this. Instead he went on ordering my whisky.”
Marla lifted her head. It was still painful to look at her, that one eye swollen dark purple.
“I suppose you’re all waiting for me, aren’t you?”
Neither Reggie nor I denied that.
“All right. You both know I have the plans. But I wasn’t going to give them up. Making a grand gesture of it.”
“Where are they, Marla?” I asked.
“Hidden in Susie’s house. I took them there in my case.”
“How did they get in your case?”
“Mikos put them there.”
“Begin at the beginning.”
It didn’t take long to tell. The day before he died Mikos told Marla that he had decided to accept Shompei’s offer. He got in touch with Mishimando to say this. Mikos wanted Mishimando to come to the vaults in the Dai Nippon Ginko and accept the plans there; to complete the deal there. But Mishimando said that this wouldn’t do, it wasn’t company policy, and Mikos must bring the plans to the firm’s offices. An appointment was arranged for three o’clock. Mikos didn’t much like this business of taking the plans out of the bank, and having them on him for a time. And it was going to be for quite some time, too, for the vault opening hours meant that he would have to take the plans out in the morning. Mikos had long suspected that there were people who wanted to steal the diesel, a threat almost routine in his trade, and particularly in this country with a distressing world reputation for snitching patents. He had taken his precautions, one of them being a second key held by Marla, and the arrangement with the bank for joint access. Mikos and his secretary were always to go to the vaults together and this meant that the Greek couldn’t be held up in his hotel by one thug and taken along to his deposit box. It wouldn’t be so easy to terrorise two people without making a party of it that would almost certainly arouse the suspicion of the vault guards. Mikos thought of detail all right.
“It wasn’t that he trusted me specially,” Marla said. “I don’t think he trusted anyone. But he paid me well. Well enough perhaps to think he was buying my loyalty. I’m glad he didn’t know the truth, even though I didn’t really like him. I’d have been ashamed to have him know that I was just a plant in his office. But I’m glad I didn’t tip Harry off about our going to the vault. I don’t have Mikos’s death on my conscience that way. Though, of course, a tip off wasn’t needed. They had a check on me, Harry watching all the time. When Mikos told me in the taxi coming away from the vaults that we were being followed by a little black car I was scared silly. I knew it was Harry. And that I could expect him to pay me out for not having tipped them off. I knew I was seeing Harry that night. It was all arranged that he bring Joe to Kamakura. I’m a coward, I suppose. Joe was there and that didn’t help. I was willing to do almost anything Harry said to keep Joe safe. And maybe myself, too.”
“Had he ever beaten you before tonight?” I asked.
Marla nodded. I pressed on with that, grimly.
“What did he use on you?”
“A sock with sand in it. Isn’t it called a cosh? He showed it to me at the Clynders. He told me what you could do with one of those. I was to find out what you were up to, Paul. And I tried to. I made a mess of it. I seem to have made a mess of everything. I knew when Harry said we were going to Tokyo it was because they were sure, by then, that I must have the plans. I drove up with him pretty certain what to expect, terrified. I’m not whitewashing myself, am I? Harry had an old British Ford and I sat beside him. He never said a word the whole way. I kept wondering if I’d find the strength to hold out against him.”
“Why did you want to, Marla?”
“Oh, I suppose I wanted to hang on to something. So I could live with myself afterwards. I never had stood up to Harry. That’s probably why he believed me in the end, that I didn’t know where the plans were. But when he started to … beat me … I knew I wasn’t going to tell, even if he killed me. I had to keep from telling him! That’s all. For myself.”
She began to cry then, and I was glad. It didn’t matter in the empty train. I felt Reggie stir in the seat beside me.
Marla said, her head bent, “Joe’s going to be all right, isn’t he?”
“We’ll get Joe, don’t worry.”
I was sure of that now. The gods are with you sometimes, they have to be.
“But what will we do when we get to Kamakura?”
She couldn’t see a way, and neither could I. I didn’t believe Joe was in the beach house. Susie, whatever her game, wouldn’t be such a fool as to lie about that. If the boy wasn’t there, where the hell was he? Reggie had an answer.
“We’re going to call on Mishimando,” he said.
Marla and I stared at him.
“But it couldn’t be …?” Marla began.
“Couldn’t it?” Reggie said. “Harry wasn’t the one who followed you from the bank, Marla. It was my Toshido. My chauffeur. On a little job of Mikos watching.”
“But it must have been Harry!”
“No. He didn’t need to tail Mikos. He’d got the tip off. I’m beginning to see things. Quite clearly. Why not Mishimando? The faithful employee, even well up the ladder, seeing his big chance. All he had to do was double-cross his company. Marla, did Mikos press the point about a meeting in the vault? Do you know?”
“Yes. Mikos didn’t like the arrangement. I think he must have argued with Mishimando but …”
“But there is a point beyond which you don’t argue with a firm like Shompei. Look, Marla, as far as you know Mikos’s dealings with Shompei were all through Mishimando?”
“I think so. I never heard of anyone else. It was certainly Mishimando who came to the office, and he never had anyone with him.”
“And when you called Shompei for Mikos you were always told to get Mishimando?”
“I always did get him. There was never any question of anyone else.”
Reggie looked at me.
“Do you think we’ve got it?” he asked.
I saw the equation, Mishimando, plus a go-between, and then Harry. Susie and Al Clynder as the go-betweens?
“Reggie,” I said. “Did Susie strike you as a woman ill enough to be needing an operation?”
“She certainly was playing a good game of tennis last summer. She could beat me. And let my mind leap to it before yours, Paul. A tennis player has good wrists. Good enough to stick a knife in someone.”
“No!” Marla called out. “I won’t believe it. Not Susie …”
“It fits all right,” I said. “Susie must have suspected when I drove off with Al that there was a good chance her husband would land up in police hands. She thought I’d escape and leave Al holding the baby, just as I did. And if I escaped that I’d go to the ‘Happy Days,’ just where she wanted me. Because there was a rendezvous there with Harry, when he’d got the plans from you.”
“You’re fitting Susie into a theory!” Marla said. “And even if she did go up to Tokyo why should s
he go prepared with a knife to kill Harry? They couldn’t know that he wouldn’t get the plans from me.”
Reggie brought out his case again.
“There’s an answer to that one. That your husband was down for elimination, whether he got the plans or not. He might have been considered a liability, a threat to them. What had they to lose? They already had one killing on their books.”
I asked Marla about the taxi, what had happened in it. Mikos had given the plans to her, and Marla had put them in her case. The Greek said that he could only see one man on the job tailing them, and if they split the man behind would have to choose which to follow. It was Mikos’s bet that he would be followed. To test this out he stopped the taxi before it could turn into the hotel courtyard and got out. If the black car followed Marla’s cab she was to drive around and come back to the hotel. She was to phone him anyway when she got to Tokyo station, before she put the case into left luggage.
“I did phone him, and he said he had been followed into the hotel. He was sure I hadn’t been. I was to take the baggage check and wait for him in the office and he didn’t want me to go out for lunch. I hadn’t meant to, anyway.”
“What did your man do?” I asked Reggie.
“He phoned me. That Mikos certainly had the plans, and I came haring up to Tokyo. I tried to speak to Mikos as he came out of the dining-room, but he wouldn’t have any. He waved his hands at me and said he only did business in his office. So where are we?”
“Leaving Omori,” I said. “Next stop Yokohama. Reggie, I’ve got a feeling that we oughtn’t to stay on this train. They may have found your car. Let’s get off at Yokohama and get a taxi. Isn’t there a back road into Kamakura the police aren’t likely to watch?”
“Yes. But we won’t go in a taxi. I’ve got a friend in Yokohama who’ll lend me his car without asking questions, or not too many. We’ll go down the Yokosuka road and cut across country from it. There won’t be any checks on the way I take you.”
For a minute or two we sat silent, waiting for Yokohama. Then I said, looking at Marla:
“There’s just one thing I want answered now. How did the Clynders know I’d been in Mikos’s suite?”
She drew in her breath, slowly. Her voice was a whisper.
“I … I told Susie.”
CHAPTER XII
IT ALWAYS amazes me how many women can go on believing they are still keeping a secret even after they’ve told it to their best friend under oath. If Susie had been the usual suburban matron with a bridge club appointment it could have been all over Kamakura, long before the police interrogated that hotel maid, that I had practically seen Mikos’s last breath going. I hoped then that Marla wouldn’t feel she had to explain, but she insisted on it.
She had a frightful head that afternoon, and Susie put her to bed with the venetians lowered, with aspirin and soothing words, just the right atmosphere for confidences. Even allowing for the strain Marla was under then I couldn’t get away from the feeling that she had talked just a little too easily. It was Reggie who reassured her that anyone else would have collapsed under Susie’s subtle pressures, I couldn’t say anything.
We got out at Yokohama, conspicuous on an empty platform, and having to walk along it to those somehow sinister stairs to the exit subway. We could have been bottled up in that subway, but we weren’t. Perhaps police who have been used to hurtling about in cars can’t jump quickly to the idea that a fugitive could dispense with a limousine in favour of public transport. The station clock said twelve ten, and all the taxis had moved off to the bright light district. We walked for twenty minutes before we found one, and after that it was easy. Reggie got his friend’s car, and we drove towards Kamakura, almost straight into a serene, bright moon. There wasn’t a trace in the sky now of one of Mishimando’s sinister clouds, a wind had pushed them away.
“You know where this house is?” I asked Reggie.
“Certainly. I’ve been to dinner a few times. Traditional Japanese party. Dyed octopus tentacle and yellow horseradish root pickle. We invariably talked about international understanding. It was his favourite topic. That was what made me practically certain he had been one of the bully boys of Co-Prosperity.”
“Supposing we’re wrong about Mishimando?”
“No harm will have been done at all. The villa is far enough out for the excuse to rouse him to use his telephone because my car has broken down.”
“I’m coming in with you,” I said.
“I’d prefer you didn’t. But I can see it would be no use arguing. But no rough stuff, Paul, until it becomes inevitable.”
“Do I look like I planned rough stuff?”
“As a matter of fact that’s exactly what you look like.”
“I’m coming too,” Marla said.
“Oh, no you’re not! Paul will be enough of a shock. If the boy’s there we’ll bring him out.”
Mishimando’s house was quite a long way from the sea which was supposed to be so good for a tired businessman’s heart, and built on high ground as though he wasn’t running any risks with another tidal wave. It had a very thick black pine wood to one side of it, and no neighbours. It was surrounded by an almost burglar-proof high fence, surmounted by wrought iron spikes and the only entrance seemed to be by one of those roofed gates. Reggie and I left the car a little way up the road and walked, leaving Marla in the back seat waiting. I couldn’t see her face and though I tried to think of something to say then it wouldn’t come.
Reggie and I stood under that little tiled roof.
“We ring this bell,” I said, “and eventually a maid comes, who goes to tell her mistress who finally tells the Lord and Master. It seems to me to give them a lot of time to get organised.”
“And what’s the alternative? One of those spikes in your guts at this stage?”
“I think I could manage the spikes via this roof if you’d let me stand on your shoulders. Then I’d be inside watching them react to you. There’s probably a peep hole in this gate.”
“He’s just a business man, not Fu Manchu.”
It was Reggie who heard the sound first. He grabbed my arm, bringing one hand to his mouth. We both stood listening. Beyond the gate, from what sounded across a small court, came the rattle of a wooden door being slid along its runners. Then the same sound repeated as the door shut again. There was no noise of footfalls at all, but a lock in the gate creaked as it was turned. A half swung back and Mr. Mishimando stepped out, dressed very neatly in an all black European suit and wearing a cloth cap.
“Good evening,” I said. “A fine night for a walk to the Daibutsu.”
For a moment, as though from an automatic habit of politeness on hearing another voice, Mishimando’s mouth opened in a kind of grimace. Moonlight shone on his gold tooth. Then he stepped back, jerking his body at lizard speed, getting behind the gate, pushing it at us. Reggie stopped him completely in that little manoeuvre by hurling himself against the closing panels. And our combined weights swung the gate around in an arc, for a moment pinning Mishimando against his own board fence. But he wasn’t held long. He began to fight like a compact, cornered mountain cat, and as evilly. I heard Reggie give a moan.
“Stand back,” I said. “And let me use my feet!”
Mishimando went down and we didn’t have any difficulty with him after that, except passive resistance. We dragged him across the court and through the little concreted vestibule, up on to the matting of the inner room, and dumped him on his stomach. Mishimando lay like someone half drowned, hauled out of a pool and waiting for the artificial respiration squad. He probably felt like that, and I knew why.
“You all right?” I asked Reggie.
“Fine, just lovely. You make your own rules?”
“I’ve had to. Why isn’t the house rattling awake, eh? Not a sound.”
The place had an empty feel and a shuttered smell.
“Household in Tokyo probably,” Reggie said, still breathing heavily. “Wouldn’t want witnesses.�
�
“You watch him. I’ll look. Hit him with something if he moves, and don’t tell him you’re going to first.”
The second room was empty. I went down the outer veranda, shuttered now against the night, switching on lights. In the third room I saw Joe, lying comfortably between two Japanese quilts, with one fist closed and pushed into his cheek. I went over and listened to his breathing, which was a little fast. I looked up then and saw Marla.
She stood on the matting in high heels, a little shaky on the softness underfoot. And then she dropped to her knees and crawled forward.
“He’s …?”
“Of course he’s all right. That’s sleep.”
“It’s not normal, Paul!”
“A couple of sleeping tablets in a glass of milk. Don’t touch him Marla, not yet. With any luck we can fix it so that he wakes up in his bed at Susie’s. I think that would be a good idea. There’ll be nothing to remember.”
“You mean … take Joe to Susie’s?”
“I have to go, and I need you for a witness.”
I went back to Reggie. Mishimando was still lying on his stomach, but he had curled himself up a bit. I propped him up, pushing him back against one of his own gilt and embossed sliding screens. He looked like a disjointed Bodhisattva and about as sleepy, the lids heavy over his eyes, but they weren’t closed.
“Like to say a poem, Mr. Mishimando? Or can’t you think of one appropriate? I can.
The camellia
Is no flower for formal ornament.
Its bloom drops
Plop!
Like the severed head
Of an August Person.”
I smiled at him.
“I used to write those by the dozen. In one of your prison camps. I got quite a knack, I thought. And it helped to pass the time between official knock-about sessions.”
Mishimando didn’t move. His face was set, with a certain droop at the corners of his mouth. It was at one time the sign of the warrior, that turned down mouth.