by Marc Olden
This morning at the post office she had received two pieces of mail from the bank. One was a note reminding her that her painting for the bank’s art show was due the first week in December, not that it would be any great masterpiece. She painted because she enjoyed it. The second bit of mail, also from the bank, was a reminder that she was to enroll in an advanced computer program for junior executives. She threw both notes away in the post office trash can and wondered what the bank would say if they knew she planned on leaving early next year even if she didn’t have a new position to go to.
William wanted her to stay at the bank with him; she knew it even though he would not come out and say so. He had a future there and would go far. But if she was to be happy she could not be too concerned with him. It was a thought that upset her.
There was a knock on her cabin door. At first she thought it was William, back early from Las Vegas. “William?”
“No, ma’am. Police.”
She froze, paintbrush held near her ear. “Police? Is anything wrong?” Had something happened to William?
“No, ma’am. I’ve flown down from San Francisco to ask you some questions about a man you work with.”
She sighed with relief. William was all right, thank God. As for the bank, all she could think of was: not again. Three times during the past few years shortages had appeared and always it had to do with computers.
She opened the cabin door. Poor man. He was soaked, his topcoat dark, his hat dripping. Both hands were in his pockets. He smiled and showed her his gold badge. Christina instantly decided that he was friendly, seemed embarrassed.
He stood and waited until she invited him in.
They grinned at each other. “Somebody in your bank’s been at it with computers again,” he said. “Couple million this time. With that kind of money you can only end up in Vegas. I mean, where else can you have big fun twenty-four hours a day?”
It suddenly occurred to her: was he talking about William?
The detective removed a hand from his pocket and took off his hat. As his hand came out of his pocket a folded piece of paper fell to the floor. Christina bent down and picked it up. She started to hand it back to him, then stopped. It looked familiar. And it was creased, as though someone had crumpled it before throwing it away.
Good Lord, it was the note sent to her by the bank concerning the new computer program. Now why had the detective taken that from the trash, where she’d dumped it? Had he been following her?
She looked from the crumpled note to him. He gave her that boyish grin again and fingered a golden stud in his right ear. He wore gloves.
When he kicked the cabin door shut behind him she flinched. It was seconds before she found her voice. “I … I don’t understand.”
He took one step closer. “Doesn’t matter. It really doesn’t matter.”
13
THERE WAS A TIME when Robbie Ambrose had not been bushi, when he had not been a warrior and invincible. Then he had been weak and women had tried to destroy him. But in the end he had escaped their tyranny.
His Westwood, Los Angeles, home had been ruled by women: his mother, two aunts, a sister. Robbie and his father, a timid history professor at UCLA, were the only males, often at the mercy of the women. For the first ten years of his life Robbie, a blond and pretty child, was made to wear girl’s clothing by a mother who openly spoke of her preference for her second daughter, and made it known that there would be no more children; childbirth was painful and sex repulsive. From then on his mother never again slept with his father. And she and her unmarried sisters made no secret of their preference for a house without men. In the words of one aunt, Robbie was an unwanted mistake.
At twelve, Robbie, urged on by his fourteen-year-old sister, entered into an incestuous relationship with her. Guilt and fear outweighed the pleasure; his sister mocked his fumbling efforts yet forced him to continue by threatening to tell their mother. When an aunt discovered them having sex, Robbie was beaten by the three older women so savagely that he could not get out of bed for weeks. Traumatized, he did not speak for over a year.
Robbie was then sent to a strict boarding school, where even a slight infraction of rules brought down swift punishment from the staff. Pleas from his father allowed Robbie entrance into the house only on holidays and for a limited time during the summer. He was forced to sleep alone, in a room with the door open and a small night-light on. The women had to know what he was doing at all times and the sister had to be protected.
At fifteen he visited his father on the UCLA campus, where the two attended a Japanese historical and cultural exhibition. Here, a spellbound Robbie watched his first karate demonstration. Such men, the karatekas, appeared to him as gods. What power they must enjoy from possessing such a skill. Robbie would have given years of his life to be one of them.
With his father’s help he found books on karate, other martial arts and on Japan and studied them avidly. At school he practiced alone for hours, devouring page after page of instruction. When an older boy tried to take the books from him Robbie kicked him in the jaw. A staff member confiscated the books and Robbie set fire to his office to retrieve them. It took four staff members to physically overcome the enraged youngster, but not before he hurt two of them seriously enough to put them in the hospital. The next day Robbie’s family was ordered to remove him from the school.
At home there was a shift in relationships. Robbie was now bigger, stronger, more sure of himself. A new hand was on the whip. The women soon learned to fear him, to know that there was no way they could control him. School was of little importance to Robbie; he lived for the martial arts, for karate, judo, kendo, stick fighting. He trained in Little Tokyo dojos and in clubs in downtown Los Angeles, and when he was not in a dojo he was in a gym, honing his body with weights, running, swimming.
At seventeen he made black belt, fighting in tournaments with a ferocity and savagery that terrified older and more experienced opponents. He was frequently disqualified for unnecessary roughness and lack of control.
But he was rarely defeated. And he was able to protect his father from the women.
When his mother, in a fit of anger, tossed one of his father’s carefully prepared history papers out the window, Robbie slapped her hard enough to drive her jaw out of line. An aunt caught prowling around Robbie’s room had her arm broken. His sister proved more difficult to deal with. When she returned home from college she looked at Robbie not as a brother but as a man. An attractive man. In her eyes he saw the memory of that time and knew that she remembered, too. He saw it in the way she baited him with a word, with the way she cupped her breasts, the way she touched his hard-muscled arms, the way she brushed against him. It was in her knowing smile.
It happened just after his twentieth birthday. His sister waited until the house was empty. Then she came to Robbie’s room, bringing him lmagawayaki, the Japanese waffle filled with sweet bean paste, one of his favorite foods. She also brought him drugs and wine. He never remembered how it happened, but happen it did. Both naked, both wanting each other, the guilt and fear rushing back to claim him once more and, above all, the pleasure.
Then she sat up in bed and began to mock him, laughing and threatening as she had done long ago. This time it would be rape and she would swear to it. No boarding school for Robbie. He was going to prison. The women—his mother, aunts, his sister—had worked out this plan to rid themselves of Robbie permanently, to once more take control of the house, and there was nothing he could do to stop them. Robbie, in a haze of drugs and wine and feeling the fear again, sprang up in bed, cupped his sister’s chin in his right hand, placed his left hand behind her ear, and savagely turned her head as though it were a steering wheel, snapping her neck.
There was no hesitation about what to do next. Taking her in his arms he carried her limp, nude body down the hall to the bathroom, sat it in the tub and turned on the water. Then be hurried to her room, got a robe and slippers and returned to the bathroom,
placing them near the tub. After soaping and washing her body, he let the water run out but did not clean the tub. Lifting her up, he sat her on the floor, back against the tub. Then, cupping her wet head in his hands, he pulled it toward him and smashed it into the edge of the tub with all his strength.
Her death was ruled accidental, the result of a fall while stepping from the tub. Traces of drugs and alcohol found in her body supported the verdict. Still, Robbie thought it best to leave California, to get as far away from the women as he could. Vietnam was the obvious answer and so was the navy, with its Black Berets, the Sea, Air, Land guerrilla force known as SEAL. Out of 250 men, Robbie was one of 6 to qualify for SEAL training.
In Vietnam he killed on orders. He and his SEAL team worked with the CIA, assassinating Cong leaders, capturing weapons and records and destroying supply caches. There were even times when killing was fun. Once, to prove that a certain Cong leader had actually been assassinated, Robbie’s team brought back both of his feet, encasing the grisly trophies in wet clay.
Like others, he took drugs before going out on a mission. The drugs did what you wanted them to. They made you alert or happy and killed any feeling that might weaken you. Robbie smoked grass laced with opium, swallowed amphetamines and Dexedrine. He did cocaine. Sometimes he shot up with the morphine worn around his neck, ordinarily to be used if he were wounded. Being wired on drugs gave Robbie a thousand eyes. Wired meant hearing the footfall of an ant.
He had taken drugs on the day he raped a Vietnamese woman and, still in her body, sliced her throat with the nine-inch blade of his k-bar. He never forgot that day, for seven members of his SEAL team were killed in a Cong ambush. Only Robbie survived. That night his drug-induced dreams were not of his dead comrades but of himself and Hachiman Dai-Bosatsu, god of war. The dream changed Robbie’s life forever.
“Give me a woman in sacrifice,” said the god of war, “and you shall never be bested in any combat. You will live forever and be bushi. You will be invincible.”
Other SEALs said Robbie wept in his sleep that night. Only Robbie knew that the weeping had been in gratitude to Hachiman Dai-Bosatsu—not for the seven who had died.
The truth of the dream could not be denied. By killing his sister and terrorizing the women in his family he had survived. And he had avoided prison. And he had come to Vietnam, where he had met Major Sparrowhawk, the Englishman who was the strong father Robbie would like to have had. Everything good in Robbie’s life had come from dominating and destroying women.
Even after leaving Vietnam and going to New York with the major, Robbie continued to hear the voice of the god of war. Drugs helped. They led him back to Hachiman, back to strength and victory. To know and act are one and the same. Knowledge, true knowledge, came only from Hachiman.
Robbie believed. And to believe meant living according to that belief. He did not hate the women he killed. He needed them. Together they were united in Chi-matsuri, the rite of blood demanded by Hachiman. Because of them Robbie could defeat anyone.
Robbie knelt beside Christina Cholles’s dead body and kissed her still-warm lips, then stood, fixed his clothes and put on his wet coat and hat before going back out into the rain. He grew stronger with each step; his ki, his energy began to expand.
And then he heard it. He stopped. His senses were so sharp he could hear raindrops falling into the lake almost a mile away.
But he heard other sounds, too, sounds that could only reach the ears of a true bushi. Eagles shrieked inside his skull and bared their talons as they attacked from out of a blood-red sky, to swoop down upon a brown, smoking earth. He heard the hiss of metal upon metal as Hachiman unsheathed his sword and moonlight reflected on that great weapon, a light so piercing that only a true warrior could look upon it with the naked eye.
In the heavy rain, Robbie stood and gazed upon that wondrous light.
14
MANNY DECKER TURNED RIGHT onto the huge parking lot and braked the dark blue Mercedes to a halt just inside the entrance. After slipping the keys into his overcoat pocket, he took a pair of wool-lined leather gloves from the seat and left the car without locking the door. Several feet away from the Mercedes he stopped in ankle-deep snow to stare at the new Long Island arena built by Paul Molise. Very impressive.
“Three gigantic ovals of off-white marble and green-tinted glass stacked one on top of the other rested on thirty feet of marble and steel columns. Winding staircases and stainless steel escalators led inside. Between the columns were fountains, miniature pools and flower gardens. Modern and distinctive.
Icy winds from the freezing waters of nearby Long Island Sound sliced into Decker’s back and neck. To prevent his hat from being blown away he pulled it down until it almost hid his eyes. His one wish was to see Charles LeClair naked in these freezing waters, his black ass going down for the third time. LeClair, who had ordered Decker to drive out here in twenty-two-degree cold.
“Listen good,” the prosecutor had said. His forefinger was an inch from Decker’s mustache. “I want me a copy of that jiveass seating plan, the one your girl friend says was put together by a certain Greek lawyer. When I have that particular document, I have Mr. Constantine Pangalos.”
LeClair turned his back. “I’ll answer your unspoken questions. No, I can’t have it mailed to me. No, I don’t trust local town officials out there or the police either, no offense. Why? Because, Mr. Manfred, the construction industry in New York is rotten from top to bottom. Everybody pays off. Everybody has his hand out. Everybody breaks the rules. So you can bet your pension that Molise and his front men have done their share of paying off. That new arena is good business for the town. The people out there are going to protect it. The minute they get wind of the fact that a federal prosecutor is interested in that phony seating plan, it’s going to disappear in a puff of smoke.”
Decker said, “Or somebody makes changes in it.”
LeClair smiled, looking like a wolf pulling his lips back from his teeth. The gesture belonged to the hunt. It had nothing to do with social graces.
“You’re playing the game the way I like to see it played, Mr. Manfred. What other thoughts are flitting across your crafty mind at the moment?”
“That somebody out there knows the plan is phony. Somebody in the department of building records, somebody on the zoning commission, maybe even in the mayor’s office. You don’t spend thirty million dollars without drawing a crowd. I’d say—I’m guessing now—but I’d say the local city hall was on top of this project from the beginning and got its share under the table and knows about the phony plan. In other words, I stand to get my chops busted by going out there to pick it up.”
“Decker, Decker. Trust me.”
In God we trust, thought the detective. All others pay cash.
“Soon as you arrive out there,” LeClair said, “get on the horn. A minute later, a federal judge will telephone building records. I guarantee it. What’s so funny?”
A smiling Decker said, “I was just thinking of the three greatest lies. No offense, but your saying ‘I guarantee it’ sort of set things off in my mind.”
“Oh? What are the three greatest lies?”
“You really want to know?” LeClair waited.
Decker said, “ ‘Your check’s in the mail.’ ‘I won’t come in your mouth.’ ‘Black is beautiful.’ ”
LeClair howled. “Jesus, that’s funny. Got to remember those.” He repeated them quickly, half to himself, half out loud, then said, “Okay, back to business. You’ll be covered out there. I do guarantee it. Hey, man, don’t laugh, I mean it. The phone call from the judge will happen. All you have to do is pick up the plan and toddle on back into Manhattan. Don’t need a platoon for that. One plan, one man.”
LeClair, in his high-back leather chair, began a gentle swing left to right. “Fact: that seating plan, as it now stands, constitutes fraud, a crime punishable by imprisonment Talking about tax fraud, stock fraud. Fact: the IRS and the state tax people aren’t the only o
nes in the dark about those five hundred missing seats. Bet you the banks who went for part of the building costs don’t know. Bet you the entertainers booked in there on a piece of the gross don’t know. More fraud. Mr. Manfred, you get me that seating plan and I’ve got Constantine Pangalos in a tight grip about the scrotum. And I have lapsed Hebrew Mr. Livingston Quarrels as well.”
LeClair leaned forward, hands folded on a desk totally cleared of papers, topped by a spotless blotter. It was, Decker knew, a sign of an organized and exact mind. The old Prussian heritage.
“As Molise’s attorneys of record,” said LeClair, “our boys will have to take the weight. Oh, they’ll have a choice: they can spend time in a federal penitentiary, which as you know is hard time indeed. Or they can give me Paul Molise and Management Systems Consultants. What we have here, Mr. Manfred, are dominos stacked neatly in a row. Knock down one, they all fall. And Senator Terry Dent? Icing on the cake.”
In the three days since LeClair had learned about the suspect seating plan he had also learned that Dent had paved the way for the building of the arena. Permits, the elimination of red tape, bank loans at favorable interest rates. The senator’s influence had smoothed the way, and LeClair guessed that when the task force dug deep enough they would find that Dent was probably a silent partner in one of the companies fronting for Molise and had points in the auditorium. Dent was known to be greedy.
Decker had told LeClair about the false seating plan before the prosecutor had gone to Washington for a special weekend with the attorney general. By the time LeClair passed the information on, it had become the biggest breakthrough to date in the government’s case against Management Systems Consultants. LeClair’s chances for the deputy-attorney spot had never been better.
On his own, Decker had learned what LeClair did to those he considered less than helpful to his career, such as DeMain and Benitez, the two cops who had been dropped from the task force.