At last, he reached the concrete pilings on the south side of the house, well hidden in darkness, and he lay there panting quietly for a minute or two before he went on. Then he skirted around the house to the back, where a wide patio had been cantilevered out of the side of the canyon, with huge terra-cotta pots on either side, and where a silent fountain collected leaves and lichen.
He ran and tumbled from one side of the patio to the other, until he reached the corner of the house. Kemo was an adept in judo and in the specialized art of Noma-oi, the “wild horses,” in which an opponent was overwhelmed by a barrage of blows so fast and violent that he looked afterward as if he had been run down by a herd of horses. Kemo was silent and quick and strong. He had killed a sailor once, in a bar on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, with a flurry of blows that nobody else in the bar had even seen. But Nancy Shiranuka had chosen him more because he was quiet and self-controlled, and because he could cook exquisitely, and because he had disciplined himself to make love for hours and hours on end without reaching a climax.
With Kemo, Nancy had reached what she described as “the state of the angels.”
Kemo waited at the back of the house on Laurel Canyon for almost ten minutes. Then, silently, he shinned up the drainpipe to the guttering that surrounded the first-floor balcony, and swung himself over the cedar railings. The wide sliding doors to the back bedroom were open a Tengu quarter of an inch, and Kemo slipped his fingers into the crevice and slid them back just enough to allow him to slip inside. The bedroom was bare, no drapes and no furnishings, only a futon on the floor for someone to sleep on. There was a smell of candles and incense–a smell that reminded Kemo of Japanese shrines–and something else. A bitter aroma of death. Kemo waited, motionless. His hearing was so acute that he could detect the suppressed sound of someone holding his breath. He decided that it was safe for him to move quickly forward to the bedroom door.
With infinite care and in utter silence, he opened the door and stepped out onto the landing.
From here, he could see down into the hallway where Mr. Esmcralda had waited only the day before. Mr. Esmeralda was there again now, his hands in his pockets, sweating in the light of the candles which flickered along the side of every wall. Kemo stared down at Mr. Esmeralda, then slipped silently along the landing to the stairs, keeping himself well back against the wall.
It took Kemo nearly five minutes to descend the staircase in total silence. He tested every one of the cedar treads before he put his weight on it, and then he stepped down so gradually and with such care that not even the molecules in the wood were disturbed. Mr. Esmeralda was still waiting impatiently in the hall, but Kemo passed him by, only eight or nine feet away, treading as silently and swiftly as a draft. Mr. Esmeralda was not even conscious of his passage. It was a Noma-oi technique known as “unseen shadows.”
Kemo found himself in a long corridor. To his left was the kitchen: he could detect the smell of Eutaniku to Harusame no Sunomono, chilled pork with noodles. He could also hear the sound of knives slicing through fish and vegetables; and that meant to him that a Japanese of importance was staying here, a Japanese who could afford two or three personal cooks. He paused for a moment, and then padded silently to the end of the corridor, where there wa* a door marked with Japanese characters. They were in the old language, but he read them quickly: A SANCTUARY FORBIDDEN TO NONBELIEVERS.
Carefully, Kemo pressed his head against the door, to pick up the vocal vibrations of whoever might be talking in the room beyond. He closed his eyes in concentration, but there was utter silence. Either the room beyond was empty, or those who were in it were silent. Nancy Shiranuka had said, Find out where he goes, who it is that he sees. The decision to enter the room or not was not his. He had been told that he must.
Using the Noma-oi movement called “the September breeze,” Kemo swiftly turned the door handle and opened the door. He paused in the doorway, in a combative stance, but the room was deserted. Three or four cushions, a bird painting on the wall, rows of candles, but nothing else. He crossed the room to the next doorway, his feet as light as a butterfly landing on a leaf, his body as well coordinated as ikebana, the arranging of flowers, each muscle tense and disciplined, each nerve sensitive to the dangers of the house.
On the second door was a plaque of iron, engraved with characters which Kemo had never seen before. As far as he could tell, the characters meant “drowning” or “beware of overwhelming water.” He touched the plaque with his fingertips, as if to reassure himself. Then he pressed his forehead to the door and closed his eyes, trying to gather voices or breathing, trying to detect the rustle of robes or slippers.
There was somebody in there. Somebody breathing, deeply and noisily. It sounded to Kemo like an invalid, somebody suffering from asthma or a chest infection. He listened again, picking up every single sound and vibration that he could, and after two or three minutes he was sure. There was a sick man in there, but the sick man was probably alone.
Soundlessly, Kemo opened the second door and stepped inside. The inner room was illuminated by hundreds of Tengu’ candles, so many that it was almost impossible to breathe. Kemo dodged to the left and kept close to the wall, touching the door closed behind him with his fingertips, touch, silently and gently.
Then he froze, listening, watching, his body rigid as kokeshi, the Japanese folk dolls made without arms or legs. All he could hear was the sizzle of the candles as the wicks burned into the wax, and the regular pounding of his own heart.
A voice said, “Who are you? Who let you in?”
Kcmo shielded his eyes against the dancing brilliance of the candles. He took one step forward, then another; and gradually he was able to focus on the creature that had spoken to him.
He had been ready to speak: ready to give some spurious explanation about working for Mr.
Esmeralda and losing his way. But when he saw the monster in the basketwork throne, the words tangled in his mouth and he was unable to speak at all. And there was that face: that
‘yellow-masked face. Unemotional, half-smiling, cruel as death.
There was a moment for Kemo when he felt as if the whole world had tipped off its axis, as if everything were coming to and end. He turned away from the creature in the basketwork throne and stared at the candles as if they could at least offer him sanity. But then the door swung open again, and there was three of them there, black-masked, cloaked in yellow, each of them posed in the martial discipline known as Oat, the art of the devils. Oni had been forbidden in Japan since the fourteenth century, but Kemo knew it from drawings and paintings. He also knew that its one purpose was to dismember and kill. In Oni, death was the only possible outcome.
Kemo wasted no time. He jumped at his three opponents with his hands whirling in the Noma-oi’ ‘windmill of oblivion.” He struck one of his opponents on the neck, his hands blizzarding at 70 or 80 miles per hour, and the man spun away as violently as if he had been hit by an automobile. Then Kemo leaped aside and changed the rhythm of his attack to “the corn-beater,” a slower, irregular pattern of hand-fighting which was impossible for any opponent to predict.
The second man went down, whirling to one side as if he had been caught by an exploding grenade. But Kemo was not fast enough for three. The third man, his eyes glittering behind his black silk mask, lashed out with his heel and sent Kemo reeling back against the wall with three ribs broken and two badly cracked.
Kemo heard a high-pitched shriek, almost a cackling sound, from the basketwork throne. Then the third man was on him, in a style of attack for which Kemo could find no defense. A swift lunge with two outstretched fingers rammed into Kemo’s eyeballs and burst them both. A fist speeding upward penetrated his abdominal muscles, parted his lungs while they were still breathing, and wrenched his heart away from its moorings in a blast of blood. By the time the third blow hit him, a knuckle-punch which was designed to pulverize the frontal lobes of his brain, Kemo was already dead and collapsing on his feet.
The Oni adept had killed him in less than three seconds: the same kind of death that Gerard had thought about only a few hours before. So fast that he never knew what hit him.
Mr. Esmeralda came into the room, staring, aghast. He looked down at Kemo’s mutilated body, then at Kappa, then at the last remaining Oat guard. He started to say something, but then he simply shook his head and stood there in silence.
“You were followed,” said Kappa in a hoarse whisper.
“I didn’t know,” said Mr. Esmeralda. “Believe me, I didn’t know.”
“You were followed,” repeated Kappa. He made the words a chilling indictment.
“Yes,” said Mr. Esmeralda. Then, almost inaudibly, “Yes.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Eva was very drunk when Gerard let himself into their apartment at three o’clock the following morning, turned on all the lights, and began packing a suitecase. She was crouched on the white leather sofa, a bottle of Polish vodka three-quarters empty by her feet. She was wrapped up in one of Gerard’s bathrobes, and she looked like the rescued victim of a hotel fire.
“Where are the girls?” Gerard asked her as he walked through the living room to find his cigar case. “Or are you so damned sloshed that you never even noticed they aren’t here?”
“They called,” said Eva in a blurry voice. “Melanie Radnick invited them to spend the weekend riding.”
“Do we know anyone called Melanie Radnick?”
Eva lifted her head and tried to focus on him, but the glaring lights hurt her eyes. “Melanie Radnick is Kelly’s best friend. They’ve been friends for–I don’t know, ever since Kelly started going to Seven Hills. The Radnicks have a ranch at La Crescenta.’’
“That’s nice for the Radnicks.”
Eva tensely rubbed the side of her face, as if she wanted to reassure herself that she was still real.
‘‘George Radnick works in gas, or something like that. Don’t you remember him? We met him at the Devoes’ anniversary party.”
Gerard counted the cigars in his case, and then closed it. “Evie,’’ he said, “go take a shower and sober up. You’re a fucking mess.”
He walked through to the bedroom again, opening drawers and taking out underwear and handkerchiefs and socks. He finished packing his suitcase neatly and quickly, and then clicked it shut.
Eva was leaning in the doorway now, a smeary vodka glass dangling from one hand, her mascara blotting her eyes like ink on a sentimental letter. She watched him open the glass jar on top of the dressing table, the Steuben duck that had been given to them by the California Republicans for the work and the money they had put into the election of President Reagan, and with conscientious pain she watched him take out his cufflinks. She said, “You’re leaving me, is that it? You’re going off with her?”
“I should be so lucky,” said Gerard sourly.
“Then what? What are you doing? What are you packing for?”
Gerard said, “I have to go away for the weekend. Business, that’s all. Nothing important.
Nothing exciting. Just business.”
“You’re taking Francesca?”
“Does it matter if I am? Look at the condition you’re in.”
“I don’t want you to come back,” said Eva. “Just stay away. The girls and I can survive very well without you.”
“You think so?” asked Gerard, absent-mindedly. “Now, where the hell did I leave my keys?”
“Gerard,” insisted Eva.
Gerard pecked her on the cheek as he walked through the door. “You’re a wonderful woman, Evie.’“
She lost her balance, and snatched at the door frame to straighten herself up. “I’m in love,” she said loudly. “Do you know that? I’m in love with another man. Not you. Somebody else. And he loves me too.”
“Well, that’s good news,” said Gerard, taking his coat out of the hall closet. “Good news for you, I mean. Not for him.”
“Gerard...”
Gerard put down his coat and his suitcase, and came over to Eva and held her shoulders in his hands. She noticed for the first time that a muscle in his cheek kept wincing, as if there was an unbearable tension inside him.
“Evie,” he said, and for a moment his voice sounded gentle and almost caring, the way it used to before they were married. A wave of memory from the days when they had been lovers came spilling onto the empty beach of tonight’s argument, tonight’s drunkenness, and Eva remembered a day at Malibu, swimming, eating lobster, laughing, running.
The wave ebbed away. “You’re a bastard,” she said quietly. “However sweetly you put it, you’re a 110 percent bastard.”
“I’m not trying to put it sweetly,” he told her. “But just don’t forget that it takes two people to make a marriage, and it takes two people to wreck a marriage.”
‘‘Three,’’ put in Eva, slurrily but with great vehemence. “You forgot Francesca.”
She swayed again, and he held her tighter. “The lovely Francesca,” she repeated.
Gerard waited for a moment and then released her. “I’ll be back the day after tomorrow,” he said, watching her with cold disgust. “Make sure you’ve sobered up.”
“I will,” said Eva. “But not for you. By the time you come back the day after tomorrow I shall make love to my lover ten times at least, and probably more.” She focused on him sharply, and then said in a voice of pure jealousy and hatred, “If and when you ever want me again, Mr.
Gerard Crowley, then you shall have to anoint that precious and unfaithful organ of yours deep in another man’s.”
Gerard, his eyes telegraphing nothing at all, slapped her fiercely across the face. His weddjng ring split her lip, and one side of her face was instantly spotted with blood.
She didn’t collapse, though, or even cry. She remained standing where she was, disheveled and bloody, and stared at him with an expression of defiance and contempt that could have turned orange juice to acid. Gerard looked back at her sharply, questioningly, and then picked up his coat and his suitcase, looked again, and made a hmph kind of noise, as if he weren’t sure that he had really hurt her enough. He opened the door.
“Go,” said Eva, through swollen lips. “Don’t let me stand in your way.”
Gerard hesitated. “Go,” said Eva, and Gerard went, frowning to himself as he closed the door behind him. He whistled an uncomfortable tune as he descended in the elevator to the garage, although the tune died away as he crossed the empty concrete to his car. He opened up the trunk, stowed away his suitcase, and then climbed into the Buick like a man who has a very long distance to travel but doesn’t quite know where.
“Shit,” he said to himself, thinking about Eva. Then he started up the engine.
It took him less than an hour to drive out to Pacoima Ranch. Although the false dawn was already lightening the eastern sky behind the San Gabriel mountains, the highway was deserted, and the only signs of human life he saw were at San Fernando Airport, where an executive plane was plaintively winking its lights on the runway. He drove past Pacoima Reservoir and then out onto the Little Tujunga Road.
Pacoima Ranch was a ramshackle collection of huts at the end of a twisting, dusty driveway, with corrugated iron rooftops and sagging verandas. The kind of place where unspeakable helter-skelter rituals might have been performed, or where Nancy Drew might have gone in search of ghosts or kidnapers or fugitives from justice.
Gerard turned the car around in front of the main ranch house, and killed the engine. Even before he had fished out his suitcase, two Japanese appeared on the veranda, one of them carrying a Uzi machine gun, both of them masked in black. They watched him, motionless, as he slammed the lid of his trunk and walked toward them. Four or five yards away, he paused.
“Good morning.” He smiled at them. The two Japanese didn’t answer, but moved aside to let Gerard cross the veranda and enter the ranch house through the screen door. Gerard asked.
“Did the commander get here yet?” and one of the Japanese nodded
each pointed upstairs.
“Ah,” said Gerard. “Sleeping it off, no doubt.” Inside, the ranch house was empty of furniture except for three or four neatly tied-up futons in the large living room, but it was scrupulously clean. On the walls were rice-paper scrolls and symbols, and a collection of black silk flags. Gerard had once asked Doctor Gempaku what the flags signified, but Doctor Gcmpaku had simply told him, “It would take only a minute for me to explain, but twenty years for you to understand.”
Gerard left his suitcase in the bare living room, and then walked through to the kitchen. There, sitting on a zabuton, a large flat cushion, was Doctor Gempaku himself, eating his breakfast. In the far corner, over the old-fashioned black-iron range, another of the masked Japanese was stirring vegetables in a donabe. It was only just past five o’clock in the morning, but Doctor Gempaku always rose early to say his prayers.
‘‘Would you care to eat?” he asked Gerard as Gerard sat down next to him on another zabuton.
Doctor Gempaku was tall and lean for a Japanese, with a closeshaven head and small, oval-framed spectacles. There was always a certain grace and mystery about him, as if he were living partly in California and partly in some tranquil Japanese garden, a garden of chrysanthemums and golden carp and esoteric riddles.
Gerard peered into Doctor Gempaku’s blue-lacquered bowl. “What’s on the menu?” he asked.
“Kitsune udon,” smiled Doctor Gempaku. “In English, that means ‘fox noodles.’ It is a particularly compelling mystery why a dish of bean curd and noodles should have become historically associated with the fox, which is one of the most evil of Japanese spirits. Some say that the fox was always fond of bean curd. Others say that kitsune udon is the last meal you are given before you are sent to everlasting hellfire.”
“Do you have any cornflakes?” asked Gerard.
Doctor Gempaku spoke quickly in Japanese, and the black-masked boy came over and set a bowl for Gerard, as well as a paper packet of chopsticks and one of the white china spoons usually used for eating soup.
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