Hector swallowed hard, his head freshly spinning. “Well, that certainly sounds depressingly Japanese enough, whatever the hell it is.”
“It is a fish, and yes, a Japanese fish to be sure,” Ian confirmed. “A genus of the pufferfish, to be precise. When prepared by a master chef, it is fugu—a Japanese delicacy. But the fish is also remarkably, naturally toxic. It’s positively packed full of tetrodotoxin. It seems if one is exposed to any of that stuff, one remains fully conscious whilst one’s muscles become paralyzed.”
Ian hesitated, probably for melodramatic effect, Hector figured, then continued with a taint of barely repressed relish, “Your throat passages constrict, Hector. You essentially paralyze and suffocate, all the while remaining alert and feeling it happen—quite a dreadful way to die, I think you’ll agree. There’s absolutely no cure. It seems a tiny puncture wound was found in Mr. Keene’s inner, upper left arm. Presumably left there by a hypodermic or needle of some kind that likely was used to administer the fatal toxin.”
Ian said, “This woman, Miss Branch—you’ll take your leave of her this evening? I mean, you’ll do that now, knowing what we know, won’t you?” A slight pause, then, “Or, rather, what we don’t know?”
There was just enough hesitation from Hector’s end to provide its own answer.
Ian sighed and said, “I don’t suppose you’ll at least have your trusty old Colt tucked under the pillow tonight when you take that bewitching creature to your bed?”
“Peacemaker’s back in New Mexico.” Hector tried to make a joke of it: “So I suppose I’ll just have to improvise with some other weapon—maybe that one I came into the world with. If it should come to that.”
Another sigh. Ian said, “Do survive the night, however you contrive to achieve that happy end, old friend. Tomorrow, we should meet up early and prepare our travel plans—the three of us, I assume.”
Ian thought more about it, then said, “I’ll come your way, if it’s agreeable. That hotel they have you put up in manages exquisite scrambled eggs, and it does, after all, boast quite an excellent champagne stock. Let’s resolve right now to put a memorable dent in Mr. Hefner’s expense account reports. The stuff of legends. Lord knows, Mr. Bond has done more than his share to fatten Hugh’s money bags of late.”
***
Sometime after midnight, mounting thunder rumbled and shook the hotel windows. Hector awakened to crazy flashes of lightning splashing his room in strobing approximation of funhouse lighting.
Haven, tangled long and bare in his arms, sighed and snuggled closer, her legs twining with his. Her body positively radiated heat. Listening to the storm raging outside, Hector ran his fingers through her thick black hair, gradually giving himself back to sleep, all the while trying to convince himself of the validity of that old axiom regarding the critical importance of keeping one’s friends close and one’s (potential?) enemies still closer.
To that last point, he tried to reassure himself with the assertion that he surely couldn’t get any closer to Haven than he presently found himself.
5 / The Man with the Golden Typewriter
Ian arrived punctually at seven in the morning, tall and imperious. He was dressed in a conservative charcoal gray suit, pale blue shirt, and sporting his customary polka-dot bowtie.
However. . .
Hector was left unsettled and deeply depressed by the fact Ian looked so very much older than his years. He was leaning heavily on a cane and there was a new, faint gray tinge to his skin. His longish face was very deeply lined and gaunt; his eye sockets deeper than in memory. Ian’s wavy, formerly brindle hair was brushed back from his high forehead and now nearly white, its limp contours brushing his shirt collar.
Yes, his younger friend looked very frail indeed in the wake of last year’s heart attack.
It struck Hector that this trip to Japan was clearly ill-advised, and that was to put it in the most charitable of terms. If anything, Ian should be staying on a tight and doctor-supervised leash, Hector decided on the spot, rigorously minding his diet, absolutely ceasing his cigarette and alcohol indulgences and generally treating himself more in the manner of some fragile Ming vase.
But Ian would never stand for any of that mollycoddling of course, not any more than Hector’s late-friend Hemingway was willing to accept such life-style restrictions when faced with grim intimations of his failing body.
Confronted with his raft of ailments and life-threatening conditions, Ernest had violently opted out rather than subside into some looming state of death-in-life, shuffling through his remaining days an increasing invalid.
The lanky Englishman shook Hector’s hand, then said with a smile, “And you must be Haven.” He kissed her on both cheeks, pulling her close, one hand patting her on the back, just above the coccyx. Haven tolerated Ian’s liberties, then, smoothing out her pleated and dark charcoal skirt, she reassumed her seat.
Before Hector or Haven could demure, Ian took it upon himself to order up their breakfast: scrambled eggs ala James Bond, made to Ian’s meticulous specifications, accompanied by a bottle of Taittinger.
They kept the ensuing breakfast conversation general and confined mostly to logistics of their coming travel. Ailing or not, Ian was his usual smooth and charming self, predictably preening and showing off for a fetching younger woman. Hector saw Haven was increasingly taken with his friend.
“We’ll have two other journalists along,” Ian said, smiling at her, “both male, I fear. So it will be your responsibility to feminize—that is to say, to civilize—the proceedings when and how you deem appropriate, my dear. That said, I am going there to research a James Bond novel, so there are certain necessary, if unseemly, destinations to which simple decorum and certain Japanese folkways will preclude your accompanying us when we venture into them, I fear. Sorry, my darling, but you’ll occasionally be left to your own devices, here or there, perhaps even for a few hours now and again, though we’ll try to keep those instances to the barest minimum, on my honor.” He raised a trembling hand in pledge.
Haven managed a smile and said. “I’m sure you will do all of that. I’m to gather your wife isn’t coming along then, Mr. Fleming?”
Hector hadn’t had a chance to warn Haven of the long, unhappy and steadily unraveling of the tempestuous Fleming marriage so well underway.
At present point, despite some apparent, mutual and hard-to-fathom drive to seemingly hang in publicly—possibly just for the sake of their young son, Caspar, Hector supposed—Ann and Ian were in reality maintaining largely separate lives.
Indeed, Hector had heard rumors of some lover in Jamaica whom Ian had under wraps. He’d heard similar rumors of Ann indulging in a sustained affair of her own.
For his part, Ian said to Haven, “I fear Mrs. Fleming will not be along. No, not this time. I fear that I’ll be decidedly stag in the exotic Orient, my dear.”
***
After their Flemingesque—and potentially heart-damaging—breakfast of scrambled eggs and pink champagne, they headed upstairs to Hector’s room, where the trio retreated to the rather spacious bathroom, turning up the taps to fox potential listening devices.
Sitting on the bathtub’s side, Haven leveled her green-eyed gaze at Ian and said, “So exactly how much has your friend confided to you about me, and, well, about everything?”
Ian smiled, putting down the lid, then taking a seat on the toilet. Fingering the head of his cane, he said, “It’s rather hard to know how to answer that since I can’t be at all sure that I know everything Hector knows about this. Why don’t we simply assume we’re all in a posture of complete disclosure and you first confide what you and your MI5 compatriots know about why Hector and I might be being lured back to Japan together.”
Haven shot Hector a glance. “Are you on board with this strategy for revelation?”
“Completely,” Hector said, leaning back against the closed bathroom door and turning up the tap a shade harder as further precaution. “Even adamantly so.�
�
“Very well,” she said. “This begins with you two gentleman and your here-to-for secret sortie on behalf of your mutual governments as part of what is now known, at least in our archives, as ‘Operation Flea.’”
Ian and Hector were both startled by her admission. Hector started to speak, but stopped when Ian held up a cautionary hand.
Fleming still maintained shadowy connections to British intelligence, after all, Hector knew. The American author couldn’t say the same of his relations with current U.S. intelligence organizations, although there was always that damned standing order from Patton’s people, stubbornly still in place despite the fact old George himself was at last safely on the wrong side of the sod.
“Hector and I are under no liberty to speak about anything related to that time period, let alone any so-called ‘Operation Flea,’ if that was even something we had knowledge of, which I will say here and now, emphatically, that we don’t.”
Ian squared his shoulders and said, “Miss Branch, you know very well as I do, that the Official Secrets Act strictly prohibits—”
“Please,” Haven said. “Please do spare me that charming yet clearly disingenuous denial and citing of the OSA, Mr. Fleming. I have, along with countless others in my organization, read the advance galleys of your forthcoming James Bond novel. The villain’s ultimate scheme in your new book, to put it in the most charitable terms, can at best be described as an audaciously and thinly fictionalized treatment of the very sort of biological terrorism against the West that you and your dashing American friend here tried to help stave off in 1945.”
Pointing a finger at Ian, she said, “When your next Bond novel, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, comes out next April Fool’s Day—if it is even permitted to see the light of day, which, frankly Mr. Fleming, is a very open question at this moment, it will confirm for others in myriad intelligence services the world over—as well as many terrorist cell organizations—that long-standing whispers about your and Mr. Lassiter’s involvement with a Japanese attempt at bioterrorism are far more than simple idle chatter in shadowy quarters of the intelligence world.”
She leveled an accusing finger at the British thriller writer and said, “Interest in Operation Flea will reignite with a vengeance when your novel appears, and all variety of dark parties will rush to try and regain what was lost in 1945. The weapon Japan had in its grasp was years, if not decades, ahead of its time. Its destructive potential remains unmatched, even today. So it’s a hotly desired property, as you can well imagine. Courtesy of your forthcoming novel, I fear that you and your American friend will soon find yourself in very hot and treacherous waters, indeed.”
In popular and critical circles, Hector was known—much to his own rueful frustration—as “the man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives.” He had increasingly used his life as fodder for his novels, and, more recently, even dared to make himself the actual occasional protagonist of his fictional works in a literary evocation of a kind of meta-fictional house of mirrors. It was a tactic that, lately, he increasingly regretted.
However, the assertion Ian had dared base a popular novel around their still highly-classified Japanese intelligence operation left Hector freshly startled and more than a bit angry at his friend.
In the moment, Hector could only rationalize that fact—if it was indeed founded in any kind of truth—by presuming ailing Ian must have convinced himself that he wouldn’t live long enough to suffer the consequences of violating the United Kingdom’s Official Secrets Act.
Still, before he could check himself, Hector blurted out at Ian, “You really wrote a novel about all that?”
Fleming’s red-faced riposte: “Dear Lord, look who’s talking, my dear, dear chap. You’re hardly in a convincing position to come all-over outraged at the prospect of any of my fiction being rooted in fact.”
Something thumped hard against Hector’s back, jarring the bathroom door and nearly pitching him forward with its impact.
Hector frowned and was half-turning when chips of wood sprayed his face, nicking his cheek and forehead, drawing blood.
The shower tiles behind Haven exploded, peppering her in porcelain dust.
Someone had fired a shot through the bathroom door.
Haven reached under her skirt and said urgently, “Get down, Hector, do that now!”
She drew a Beretta from a holster bound around her shapely upper thigh and fired three times back through the bathroom door.
A slightly more distant, heavy thump followed.
Cautiously, Hector attempted to open the perforated door. Weight from the other side forced it open farther and faster in his face than he’d anticipated. The door very nearly smacked his already bloodied cheek.
A crouched Hiroshi Takahashi tumbled onto the bathroom tiles. In one hand he gripped a kind of radio or listening device. That was attached by a cord to a suction cup, which in turn was fastened to the splintered lavatory door. The device was also connected to earphones still affixed to the man’s ears.
As Hiroshi sprawled onto the tile, Hector saw sharp metal stars projecting from the man’s bleeding back. In his other hand, Hiroshi held a still-smoking gun—presumably the one that fired the single, errant shot through the bathroom door that had superficially wounded Hector and just missed killing Haven.
Further across the room, an even more grotesque figure lay sprawled and clawing spastically at the carpet with gloved fingers. The prone figure clutched at its back with its other, trembling hand. The stranger was clad head-to-toe in black—dark slacks, long-sleeved turtleneck shirt and a black ski mask.
Haven said, “Hector, quickly, get that one in here and on the tile before he bleeds all over the carpet!”
Grabbing the black-clad stranger by the ankles, Hector complied. He dragged the man face down into the bathroom, then dropped him untidily halfway across Hiroshi’s corpse.
Haven, gun trained on the black clad man’s head, reached down and tugged off his mask.
The stranger was likely in his mid-twenties, and clearly Asian. Haven gripped his jaw tightly and pressed her gun’s barrel under his throat. She said, “You tell us who you work for or else—”
She let it drop, her threat hanging there, unfinished.
The young assassin stared up at her, eyes wide but unseeing, foam and spittle bubbling from the corners of his mouth. He’d bitten through some sort of suicide capsule—probably potassium cyanide, Hector figured.
Rising, Haven said urgently to Ian, “You better clear out, for now. We’ll try and say any neighboring complainers were hearing gunshots on the television from some crime drama turned up too loud. I’ll have my people dispatch a crew to come and clear the scene here. Hector and I will come to your home later this evening, Ian. Then we can resume this conversation.”
Hector and Ian didn’t question Haven’s taking charge, nor did they balk at her suggested course of action: It all appeared to make cold enough sense in the bloody moment. Hector figured Haven had that thing Hem had so revered—so-called grace under pressure—in spades.
When Ian had gone and they were waiting outside the again-closed bathroom door, lingering to see if anyone would come knocking to inquire about overheard gunshots, Haven inquired, seemingly apropos of nothing: “Something I simply have to ask about your friend while I’m thinking on it, and on his infernal writings. Maybe it’s just another myth. Are the stories true about Fleming actually having a golden typewriter?”
In 1952, about the time of the publication of his first Bond novel, Ian had indeed rewarded himself with the purchase of a customized, gold-plated, Royal Quiet Delux Portable typewriter. Hector distractedly confirmed as much for Haven.
She shook her head and said, “Do you have a gold typewriter like Ian’s?”
“Christ, no,” he said. “Not even silver or bronze. I favor off-the-shelf, portable Royals.” For proof he pointed at the one sitting on his hotel room’s writing desk. “Only Ian would have the audacity to write on a
machine plated with gold. Jesus, if I had to write on such a contraption, I’d brood over every comma.”
Hector turned his attention to the ruined bathroom door. Gesturing that direction, he said, “To more important matters—if someone beats your boys here, the bullet holes in that door are going to be damned hard to explain away.”
Haven shrugged. “We’ll simply say we had a row. I pushed and pushed and you punched the door in anger. Paint me as a bitch—it’s a part I can easily play. And you have a certain reputation, as we both have acknowledged. So they would accept that. I’m sure. And I’m equally sure Mr. Hefner would understand when the repair bill came due—owing to that reputation of yours.”
He was in no mood for joking. Hector said, “That man you shot through the door. Who is the hell is he? Any clue?”
“I expect we both know the likely answer to that. It will take some confirming, but my money is on the Black Dragons. I expect that man came to do the very thing he unexpectedly found our friend from the plane attempting—that is, trying to eavesdrop on us in there.”
Probably that was quite so. Hector shook his head and took a seat at the foot of the bed. He thought about smoking a cigarette to calm his nerves, but memories of the way Ian looked discouraged him. He said, “Those pieces of metal he used to kill the man who was on the plane with us—what are those things? I’ve never seen anything like them.”
“Japanese throwing stars,” Haven said, at last re-holstering her gun after reloading, again showing quite a bit of leg in the process. “Those throwing stars tell their own story about the man I killed and of his probable origins. Or, rather that is to say, of his probable affiliations. Those metal stars are also called shuriken, which means, roughly, ‘sword hidden in hand.’ They’re razor-edged, and in this case, likely coated in some sort of a poison, I’d wager.”
Death in the Face Page 5