Tengu

by Graham Masterton

  In a matter of moments, with humility but also with dignity, Nancy had stripped him naked. His penis rose higher with every heartbeat. She ran her hands down his bare chest, making him shiver, and down his thighs. Then she loosened her own pale-pink silk robe and let it slide on to the polished floor. She was slim and small-breasted, naked except for an embroidered ribbon of white silk that was fastened around her waist and between her legs, tied so tight that it disappeared into the cleft of her sex.

  She untied the ribbon, and drew it off herself, to reveal that it had been keeping in place, inside her, a miniature jade figure of a baldheaded deity carrying a peach, the symbol of the female vulva. Without comment, she set the figurine aside, and then took Jerry’s hand and led him into the bathroom.

  Under a sharp, needling shower, Nancy soaped his shoulders, his back, and his buttocks. She cupped his balls in her hand for a moment, while she soaped up and down the shaft of his erection; but not for too long. The true stimulation would come later. Then she stood with her eyes closed, her long dark hair spreading wet across her shoulders, as Jerry slowly and firmly lathered her back, her breasts, and her slender thighs. The water dribbling between her legs turned her dark heart-shaped pubic hair into a tail.

  Afterward, fresh and dried, they closed themselves in the bedroom, where a large soft futon lay on the floor. Nancy insisted that Jerry close his eyes and lie on his back. She massaged him with lightly scented oil, and spoke to him monotonously and matter-of-factly about the mystical power of yin and yang, the sexual union; and of the nutritive powers which wise men could gain from drinking “the medicine of the three mountain peaks” from the women they couple with.

  The first juice was the juice of the Red Lotus Peak, saliva from the tongue; the second juice was from the Double Lotus Peak, milk from the breasts; the third was the most nourishing juice of all, and should be imbibed by men in the greatest quantities possible, the precious juice of the Mysterious Geteway.

  Jerry lay back on the futon, feeling Nancy’s fingers working at his muscles, feeling her naked skin against his, and although his anxiety for David never left him, it became tempered with a new determination, more resolute and more balanced. He began to feel that if he had gone to Nancy Shiranuka for help, instead of his shrink, he might have forgotten Hiroshima years ago.

  At last, with exceptional elegance, as beautifully curved as a bamboo-brush painting, Nancy lifted herself over him, and took his penis in her hand, so that she could couch it in the slippery curves of her vulva, and, with a musical sigh, sink down on him, so deeply that she trembled with a sensation that was part pleasure and pan shock.

  She was like no other woman, Caucasian or Oriental, that Jerry had ever slept with. She seemed to give herself to him totally, surrender her pride and her personality without any reservation whatsoever. She rose up and down on him as if she were conjuring the very soul out ot him, through his penis; and at the instant of his first climax she withdrew herself, only by a fraction of an inch, so that they could both witness the jets of semen anointing her open lips.

  They were locked together in the bedroom for an hour and a half, and during that time she brought him to three climaxes, opening her body up to him in every possible way. Yet, when it was finished and she lay next to him on the futon smoking a cigarette, he felt as if he had been through a mystical rather than a physical experience. He understood now what she had meant about the bond between two living people, the knot tied between their spirits, as if every movement had twisted one silken cord around another, as if each act of intimacy had tightened the ties.

  When they were quiet again, when their breathing was gentle and even, Jerry said, “There’s something else I have to ask you.”

  Nancy lay beside him, her face so close that he could scarcely focus on it. He’d been growing increasingly far-sighted with age, and he found that he was reading newspapers at arm’s length these days. Eyeglasses, bridgework, baldness–how the human body decayed. Nancy didn’t know how much of a gift of youthfulness she had given him by making love to him this afternoon.

  ‘‘The police say they found two bowls and two samurai swords out at Rancho Encino Hospital.

  Blue porcelain bowls, containing incense or ash. And the swords were crossed. They’ve drawn the obvious inference that they were part of some sort of Japanese ritual, but they don’t know what, and neither do I.”

  Nancy was silent, stroking Jerry’s shoulder. Then she said, “The police shot and mortally wounded the Tengu who was sent to kill Admiral Thorson the night before last. It would have required a magical ceremony close to the Tengu’s body to draw back the demon and revive the Tengu. The ceremony with the bowls and swords is called the Hour of Fire. It directs the Tengu back toward the dead meat of his previous host, and encourages him to bring it back to life again. A Tengu can be revived even if he has been burned to ashes. The Hour of Fire is specifically forbidden, not only by the priests of Shrine Shinto themselves, but, by secret agreement, by the Japanese police. Anyone who is thought to be trying to perform the ritual of the Hour of Fire is arrested and imprisoned, and usually meets with a fatal accident while in police custody.”

  “They take it that seriously?”

  “They take the Tengu seriously,” Nancy corrected him. “The Tengu is the darkest of all Japanese demons because he thrives on the weakness and corruption of the human soul. The purer the soul that the Tengu can corrupt, the greater the social and ethical damage to Japanese society, and the greater the Tengu’s increasing strength. The company boss who takes a bribe after twenty years with a spotless record; the hardworking man who decides to steal; the woman who murders her husband–they are all victims of the Tengu. Has it never occurred to you why Japanese society is structured like it is? Why large companies act so paternally and protectively to their workers? They are shielding the people for whom they are responsible from the madness and violence that the Tengu always brings with him; the madness of war, the madness of murder, the madness of cruelty. The Tengu has affected Japanese thinking for hundreds of years. I believe it, no matter how much you smile at me. Some Japanese learned to control his influence: the samurai warriors, for instance were always balancing between strict morality and utter violent insanity. They courted possession by the Tengu, and hoped that they could control him. But the Tengu eventually brought Japan to war with the United States, which was the ultimate madness, politically and historically and socially. Japan recovered, but the Tengu lives on, and always will, to haunt and taint the Japanese spirit. You must forgive us for many things, Jerry. We are a people possessed.” It was nearly a quarter to two when Jerry dressed again, and called a cab to take him back to Orchid Place. Nancy had warmed him a little deluxe sake, the sak€ with the gold leaf floating in it, and they sat facing each other in the living room, drinking and enjoying each other’s satisfaction and warmth.

  At last, she opened her sleeve, and gave him a small porcelain box, decorated with erotic paintings and perforated with elaborate holes.

  “What’s this?” he asked her, turning it over and over.

  “That is your keepsake for what we did today. That is your talisman. It will help to protect you.

  All you have to do is have faith in it, and have faith in the joining-together we achieved this afternoon.”

  He said, “If I thought that it was possible,for a man to fall in love with a woman after meeting her only twice, I’d say that it has just happened to me.’’

  Nancy smiled. “I have loved too many men, and been used by too many men. I have become because of my many experiences the symbol of a woman, rather than an individual woman whom you could love as a mistress or a wife. Would you really like to kiss every morning as you leave for work the lips of a woman who has fellated a whole forest of penises, white, black, and yellow? Would you really like to make love to a body that has been used and abused so many thousands of times? Sex to me has become something spiritual, something close to the very heart of the meaning of my exi
stence. It is no longer a way of forming an attachment with one man. I don’t care if I have one man or many men. All that I care about now is understanding my life, and reaching the peaks of sensory excitement that help me to do so.’’

  Jerry looked at her without speaking for almost a minute. Then he looked down at the porcelain box she had given him and asked, “Can you tell me what this is?”

  “It’s a cricket cage,” she said. “Chinese ladies used to catch singing crickets and put them inside, and then store the cages inside their sleeves, so that wherever they went walking in their gardens, they were accompanied by the singing of crickets.”

  “There’s no cricket in it now,” said Jerry.

  “No,” said Nancy. “But instead I have put inside it something even more attractive, and protective. A koban-sized shunga print, a kachi-e, a victory picture for you to carry into your conflict. It shows a highborn lady having intercourse with her lover in front of a mirror. It is by Shuncho, and it was printed in the mid-1780’s, as one of a series called Koshuku-zue juni-ko. It represents the acts which you and I have performed this afternoon, and it will guard your life against the Tengu.”

  Jerry held up the cricket cage in his hand. “I wish I could believe that.’’

  “You must believe it. If you doubt it, think to yourself: Why did this woman who is almost a total stranger make love to me today, if it were not to form a bond of strength against the demon?”

  Jerry looked at his wristwatch, the same gold wristwatch they had given him when he left the Navy. His prize for bombing Hiroshima. He said, “I have to go now.”

  Nancy held his wrist and placed his hand inside her silken robe, against her breast, so that he could feel her nipple rising against the palm of her hand. “I come from the ukiyo-machi,” she said. “You must never think of me as a lover, but only as a bond. Someone with whom you formed a sexual and a mystical union.”

  Jerry leaned forward to kiss her, but she turned her head to one side. “When you have defeated the Tengu,” she said, “come back here at once and drink your fill of the joke of the Mysterious Gateway, to restore your strength. Until then, you should thirst.”

  Jerry went to the door and opened it. “You’re a very strange and beautiful person,” he told her.

  He felt moved by what had happened to him in the past two hours. Nancy remained where she was, striped by the brilliant sunshine through her Venetian blinds, her black hair shining, one breast still bare.

  The cab was waiting for him. Jerry said, ‘‘Eleven Orchid Place, please.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Gerard was shrugging on his coat, and reaching for his keys and his pen, when Francesca came back into the office from lunch. “Gerard,” she said, “you didn’t tell me you were going out.”

  Gerard gave her an evasive grin. “Listen, I won’t be long, okay? I have to see Chatfield about those Dutch cigars.”

  “Henry Chatfield called yesterday. It’s all cleared up. He’s probably back in New York by now.”

  Gerard stared at her coldly. “Listen,’’ he said, “if I have to see Chatfield about those cigars, then I have to see Chatfield about those cigars. You understand me? Jesus Christ, you’re not my wife.”

  Francesca raised her head a little and looked at Gerard through long, mascaraed lashes.

  “Gerard,” she said, “I have to know where you’re going.”

  “I’m going out, okay? Out of the door and along the corridor and down to the parking lot, and out.”

  Francesca said, as gently as she could manage, “That’s not enough.”

  “What do you mean, “That’s not enough?’ What are you talking about?”

  Francesca sat down, crossing her long artificially suntanned legs. She looked Gerard directly in the eye, with a look he hadn’t seen before. Almost official. She said, “This morning you went to the Avis desk at the airport and rented a white Pontiac Grand Prix in the name of Hudson Foss.

  Afterward, you drove to a lock-up garage in Westwood, which is rented from Westwood Star Properties by someone who calls himself P. B. Sexton. That garage contains a number of contraband items, including video equipment, pornographic viedeotapes and magazines, cocaine, whiskey, vodka, men’s apparel, and weapons, one of which was an M-60E1 machinegun complete with ammunition and spare barrels.”

  Gerard was silent as Francesca continued. “You were seen to load the M-60 machine gun and other weapons into the trunk of the Grand Prix, and then drive it to the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard, where you checked into one of the bungalows in the name of Wisby. Then you immediately caught a cab and came back here.

  Gerard looked down at the polished surface of his leather-topped desk, and then back up at Francesca. All of a sudden, he saw what she was. Hard, certainly: but with that implacable well-trained hardness of a law-enforcement officer. Aquisitive, yes, but only for facts and figures and damning information. A gold digger who was digging for convictions, not diamond bracelets. She had gone to bed with him not for himself but for evidence. Everything he had boasted about, every extravagant gift he had bought her–it had all gone down in a notebook somewhere, to be given as meticulous information for the prosecution when he was eventually brought to court.

  “Well,” he said, “it seems like I’ve made quite a fool of myself.’’

  Francesca said, “You can still save yourself a lot of trouble if you tell me what’s going on. You’re involved in something, aren’t you, with Mr. Esmeralda? Something more than forming a team of karate bodyguards.”

  Gerard struck a match and slowly began to feed a cigar. “What are you?” he asked her. “U.S.

  Customs? What?”

  Francesca didn’t answer. All she said was, “There’s only one way you can save yourself, Gerard.

  You have to tell me what’s going on.

  Gerard asked, “You’ve reported any of this? The guns? Do your bosses know what’s going on?”

  “They will.”

  “They will, huh?”

  “I have a certain amount of discretionary power when I’m operating undercover in the field.”

  Gerard slowly shook his head, like a man who has watched his favorite hockey team let in eleven goals in a row. “So, going to bed with me was ‘operating in the field,’ was it? I’m glad to know that romance is not yet dead.”

  “You’ve been running guns and you’ve been smuggling narcotics,” said Francesca. “You’ve also been dealing in industrial and military information. You didn’t really expect the CIA not to show some interest in you, did you? You’re not that modest?”

  “I don’t think modesty has much to do it,” said Gerard frostily. There was a feeling inside of him like boiling oxygen, the kind of freezing steam that surrounds a rocket just beore its launch. “I was actually stupid enough to believe that you were my lover. I run a few deals, sure. You know that. You’ve helped me to organize some of them. A caper here and a caper there. Something to keep the cashflow flowing. But is it really worth this? Is it really worth your sleeping with me, pretending to love me, taking me away from my wife? Wouldn’t you call than entrapment? Well, maybe you wouldn’t. It seems like your morality is a whole lot different from mine.”

  “Gerard, I have to know what the guns are for.”

  Gerard shook his head. “No, Francesca, you don’t have to know what the guns are for. You’re going to get the hell out of this office, and get the hell out of my life, and if I ever set eyes on you anywhere near me again, I’m going to bang you one right in the nose. You understand me?”

  “Do you want me to have you arrested?” asked Francesca. “I can do that just by picking up the phone.”

  “Go on, then,” said Gerard. “Pick up the phone.”

  Francesca stayed where she was. “Gerard,” she said, “you’re making this too difficult.”

  “It’s easy,” Gerard told her. He lifted up the receiver and held it out to her. “Here it is. Dial.

  Have me arrested.”

&n
bsp; “Gerard...”

  Gerard slammed the phone down again. He was furious, shaking with temper. “You dumb bitch! Either bust me or leave me alone! If you’ve got the goddamned nerve to go to bed with me, at least have the goddamned nerve to finish the job and pull me in!”

  “Gerard, I need to know about Esmeralda. I need to know about the guns.”

  “Well, fuck you,” shouted Gerard, “because I’m not going to tell you anything about either of them without a formal arrest and without a lawyer. And if you’re not going to arrest me, or question me formally, then you can get the hell out of here because you’re fired, as my secretary, and right now you’re trespassing.”

  Francesca stood up. “All right,” she said. “Don’t say that I didn’t give you a fair chance.”

  “If your name never passes my lips again, baby, that’ll be far too often for me. Now, out.”

  Francesca hesitated for a moment, looking at him, trying to appeal to him. But he rammed his hands into his trouscr pockets and stalked to the window, staring out over the Avenue of the Stars and smoking his cigar in steady, furious puffs.

  She said, “It wasn’t all business, Gerard. I can’t turn around now and say that I wasn’t fond of you, or that you weren’t any good in bed. You’re selfish, and you’re distant, but you know how to give a woman what she wants.’’

  Gerard said nothing, but continued to puff at his cigar.

  “So long, then” said Francesca.

  She opened the office door, and it was then that the Tengu burst in, half tearing the door off its hinges, knocking Francesca right back against Gerard’s desk, sprawling over the top of it in a shower of calendars, pens, photographs, paper clips, and letters. She didn’t even have time to scream.