Death in the Face

by Craig McDonald

  “Shuriken. You speak Japanese, then?”

  “I grew up there for the most part, remember? So, yes, I speak Japanese rather fluently.”

  She smiled and sat down next to Hector on the bed. She kissed him, slow and hard, taking the lead. Pulling away for just a moment, Haven said, “You know, I think we just stumbled upon my cover for you regarding your friends when we get to Japan. I’ll be your chaps’ official translator. It works for you?”

  He’d already seen some first-hand proof she had a talent for tongues. He said, “Sure, it’s a splendid idea.”

  6/ Ghost of a Flea

  Within twenty minutes of Ian’s departure, several suspiciously fit-looking young men dressed in custodial garb bustled into Hector’s hotel room.

  The men seemed just this side of rough trade to Hector—a little too unpolished to make the grade as fully-fledged SIS. Yet, they were certainly efficient enough. They speedily tumbled the two corpses into a large, wheeled cloth container intended for transporting soiled bed sheets and used towels to the hotel laundry.

  At the same time, another man set to work on eradicating a smattering of stray droplets of blood staining the carpet. He did that with a brush and some odorless cleaning agent in a spray bottle.

  After covering the bodies with linens, his two mates helped themselves to a matching, unmarred bathroom door from an adjacent room that they deftly used to replace Hector’s ruined door.

  Watching them quickly sanitize the scene of the crime, expertly expunging all signs of carnage, Hector comforted himself at least Mr. Hefner wouldn’t be receiving any bills for hotel room damages that might in turn trigger testy calls from Playboy’s lawyers somewhere down his life’s uneasy road.

  ***

  After the murderous melee in his room, Hector decided it wasn’t advisable to be out walking the streets, personally unarmed and exposed to another potential attack by parties still unknown. He therefore agreed to Haven’s offer for “a company car” to transport them to Ian’s home for the resumption of their travel and allied strategic planning.

  Riding in the back of a tan Highline Consule, a thick glass partition separating them from their driver—as well as from that man’s ears, presumably—Haven said, “So, of course this is all about your and Ian’s ties to the immediate aftermath of the last war and Japan’s rather disingenuously named Army Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory, commanded by Shiro Ishii. What eventually came to be known, rather notoriously, I suppose you’ll agree, as Unit 731. Can we at least have that much out in the open now?”

  Hector’s stomach tightened. He’d been provided dark insight into human populations many times in his storied, blood-and-thunder life, but the things he’d heard, learned or actually observed regarding Unit 731 still made him shudder, down deep. All that could even now set the writer to grinding his teeth and wishing his nation’s former Asian enemies in the deepest, tightest circles of Hell.

  When it was a fully going concern, Unit 731 had been duplicitously declared a lumber mill by the Imperial Government in one of the iciest of wartime hoaxes.

  In reality, Unit 731 was a clinic for the development of biological and chemical warfare, as well as still more horrific medical experiments and unthinkable, stomach-twisting endurance tests that used live human subjects, both “foreign and domestic.”

  When inquiring as to the success of some recent experiment or medical atrocity, the running joke among members of the Unit had reportedly been to ask, “How many logs fell?”

  Hector tugged at his tie and said, “I’d rather not have to cover this sorry ground more than absolutely necessary, so we best just wait for Ian to be present for the rest, or don’t you agree?”

  Assessing him, then taking his hand in both of hers, Haven said, “Of course, darling. Just as you say. Anyway, the way you put it, it’s the kind of question that answers itself. You’ve seen so many terrible things in your life. I’ve read your FBI file, of course. It took some time to do that, you know—it’s terrifically dense, yet oddly compelling and even macabre—almost like reading one of your books. Coupled with your actual novels, I now have a piercing sense of the sublime sweep of your storied life. My God, it’s no wonder you write the things you do.”

  Troubled by something she must have seen in his expression and sensing she was on uncertain ground, she hesitated, then changed the subject. One hand resting on his knee, she said, “I have a feeling that things between your friend and his wife aren’t so terribly terrific.”

  At least a little grateful for the change in topic, Hector tipped his head back against the seat and closed his eyes. “I’m not sure they were ever good, much less terrific, for those two. Butterflies and deep-seated matrimonial fears are what gave birth to James Bond, you know. Ian wrote his first novel, Casino Royale, to try and take his mind off his looming wedding—a union I think he knew even then was a calamitous mistake.”

  Hector sighed and said, “Ann has always looked down on Ian’s writing, often in the cruelest way, even as she’s savored the considerable mad money it provides her. Her intellectual and supposedly more literary friends are always having a mean laugh at Ian’s expense as they drink the fine wine and eat the caviar that Agent Bond has paid for.” He shook his head, a sour frown on his face. “The sorry bastards.”

  An old, adjectival dig for such types that he associated with Hem seized his mind and he gave it voice: “Pilot fish.”

  “He could leave her,” Haven said. “By all accounts, Ian’s got a kind of mistress in Jamaica, where the Bond books are written once a year.”

  “If his health wasn’t so poor, Ian might really do that. If he and his wife didn’t have a child together.” Hector shook his head and said, “That old, bloody and sorry word, if.”

  He looked over his shoulder and said, “I suppose your man at the wheel is attuned to the possibility—hell, the strong probability—we’re being followed?”

  “Yes, and we are most certainly being spied on—those cars in front and in back—but by people from our side,” Haven said. “That also of course makes it easier to spot tails from the opposition, particularly when you’re traveling in numbers as we are now. I’d wager there’s no exaggeration in my saying that at this moment Hector Lassiter, you’re probably the safest you’ve been since you left your bed in New Mexico so many days ago.”

  ***

  As if to underscore Hector’s confidences to Haven about the tempestuous Fleming marriage, they arrived at Sevenhampton to find Ann off to visit the lefty politician Hugh Gaitskell, her current lover.

  Ann’s affair; Ian’s affair? Life was too short to suffer in the yoke of such a befouled union. Hector simply couldn’t fathom sticking it out in a sham marriage, not even for the sake of a child.

  As dinner hour loomed, Ian looked extremely tired and even more drawn than at breakfast. Hector thought again of how his younger, yet craggy and haggard-looking friend must not have truly recovered from the heart attack he’d survived several months back.

  Yet the near stub of a Morland dangled from Ian’s cigarette holder, presently. Countless others littered an ashtray. Hector wondered to himself exactly which coffin nail of the day this one constituted.

  In Ian’s novels, the indestructible and perpetually thirty-fiveish James Bond was attributed with smoking some impossible number of handmade Turkish-blend cigarettes each day. Hector sometimes feared Ian had a compulsion to match his fictional beast’s impossible-to-sustain nicotine indulgence.

  He’d heard before the heart attack struck so few months ago, that Ian was actually averaging something like sixty cigarettes a day.

  Even in his youth, other than during a couple of terrible, white-knuckle emergency room vigils, Hector couldn’t remember smoking more than twenty cigarettes in a single day, but he all too well remembered feeling like hell after hitting that sorry mark.

  Once more, Hector impulsively resisted the notion to smoke. Maybe this trip to Japan and Ian’s cautionary example would finally br
eak him of the damned habit forever, he told himself. He hoped so.

  He’d stopped before, here and there, after all—given it up entirely and cold turkey more than once, though doing so mostly for the presumed love of—or lust after—the right wrong woman passing through his life at some ultimately fleeting interval.

  Closing and locking the front door behind them, Ian said, “I should confess at the outset Miss Branch’s colleagues were by here a bit ago with all kinds of Bondian or Q Branch-style gadgets and this place has now been declared happily and emphatically to be a bug-free zone.”

  With that assurance, Ian smiled and said, “And now it’s officially the martini hour. Indulging in the cocktails to come is compulsory, even if you’re still on Her Majesty’s clock, Miss Branch.” He handed her a drink and said, “This is called a Vesper, after the hour.”

  Hector accepted his drink, always having enjoyed traditional vodka martinis, long before Fleming’s Bond had popularized them.

  For his part, Hector despised gin; he also idiosyncratically and instinctively distrusted those who imbibed it as a cocktail of preference—but Ian’s gin-and-vodka-hybrid version of the martini was one of his own creation and a good bit off the well-beaten, Gordon’s path.

  Hector also more typically preferred olives in his drink rather than Ian’s proscribed, large slice of lemon peel.

  Still, no bartender in the world made the cocktail quite as Ian did when he presumed to play mixologist, and how many more times might that happen with Ian in such a frail state?

  That was the trouble with being over sixty, Hector thought, and it was far from his first time doing so. It was the same with everything, these days, wasn’t it? Increasingly, he found himself simultaneously chiding and warning himself, typically along the sorry lines of:

  Best enjoy this, old pal—savor it. Is this the last dance? Probably that is so. Knowing that, you best make it last longer.

  Or:

  Is this your last time seeing Paris? Better hit all the old haunts again, just in case. . . .

  Is this the last, calamitously desirable fine young lady you’ll be granted?

  Is this one your last novel?

  Will you live to write this particular story, all the way to ‘The End’?

  No. . . . Better write faster, because life is a promise nobody keeps.

  Ian twisted the cap tighter on the bottle of Kina Lillet, then sat down in a leather chair by the fire with his own drink. “No further issues at the hotel, I take it?”

  He nodded at the ceiling. With a certain bitter irony, he said, “I’m alone for the evening—all evening I’m fairly certain, and for the night in full, as Caspar is staying over elsewhere, too. I’m already packed for the Orient, so you’re welcome to stay here in a guest room for the evening, Hector. Safety in numbers and all that.” A dark smile of inquiry and commiseration: “Or perhaps us being together is simply too much convenience for the enemy?”

  Ian turned, smiling sadly at Haven. “Afraid I can’t extend the same offer to you, my dear. If Anne returned and found a beautiful younger woman under this roof, even one attached firmly to a good friend like Hector? I fear it’s just unseemly enough for some of Ann’s near always-present and remora-like friends to ratchet up the friction I too often endure.”

  “I’ll think seriously on the offer of lodging,” Hector said. It actually made a certain sort of sense: It wouldn’t be hard to have his luggage collected and brought over by Haven’s people. And anyway, the bathroom and entryway of his hotel room now carried unpleasant enough memories, despite all the work done to erase the killings that had happened mere hours ago.

  There was that other factor, too: It would give Ian and Hector time alone to plot, to talk and to plan without Haven potentially spying on them.

  Ian stared into his drink—to his credit, he was nursing the cocktail he shouldn’t be touching, not at all—and said, “So where to start, Hector?”

  Crossing one long shapely leg over the other and leaning forward—her elbows crossed, deepening the valley between her breasts—Haven said, “How about with October 15, 1945, when, under the guise of visiting journalists, you chaps went to Japan in a clandestine effort to recover critical, microfilmed materials. That strip of film my people believe detailed a potentially devastating biological organism that would result in complete cattle and livestock infertility. The thing that was planned to be delivered via fleas encased in special, porcelain bombs.”

  Hector and Ian shared a long, searching look.

  The English author at last said, “Indeed. Why don’t we start just there?”

  ***

  Strictly speaking, Hector and Ian were casually acquainted prior to their first shared trip to Japan—it was simply that neither had any grasp of the other’s peculiar role in relation to their nations’ respective, national intelligence programs in the early going.

  Hector’s ties to the OSS were particularly well hidden and obscured by design, as his official, public role as a war correspondent strictly forbade the very activities and weapons predicated by his responsibilities for the Office of Strategic Services.

  Once they were officially paired for their shared mission into Japan, the two “journalists” got on like crazy, treating their strange sortie into the freshly vanquished “Land of the Rising Sun” as a kind of drunken and woman-deflowering, would-be spies’ holiday.

  Their so-called mission was decidedly outré, after all.

  An American crime novelist and sometimes journalist—coupled with a British journalist-turned-Naval attaché—were being sent over to quietly meet a Japanese poet.

  This was being done in an effort to liberate a scrap of precious microfilm created by self-recriminatory Japanese scientists after being clandestinely ferreted out of the sinister headquarters of Unit 731.

  That smuggling out had all been undertaken under direst of risks, as well as the very noses of Russians eager to lay claim to the fabled, infertility-carrying pests for potential use against the Kremlin’s wartime allies.

  As Ian presumed to tell the tale to Haven, Hector half-listened, more firmly moving in the country of his memory regarding that strange and boozy, long-ago idyll—Ian’s half-heard words stirring recollections of their strange Japanese nights and days.

  The one who delivered the microfilm to them was indeed a poet, a gentle appearing man named Mitsuharu Kaneko.

  But Kaneko possessed real steel and cunning, belying his seemingly benign occupation as composer of verse.

  Throughout the war, quietly and steadfastly, Kaneko had bravely penned reams of anti-war poetry.

  When his beloved son at last reached dreaded draft age, the calculating poet had made his boy inhale damaging smoke so he would fall ill with apparent asthma, so he would be spared conscription and saved from certain-to-prove fatal combat as the tides of war turned so decidedly against Imperial Japan.

  Through channels never adequately explained to Ian or Hector, the poet had somehow come to possess the precious, deadly microfilm carrying all of the unspeakable fruits of Shiro Ishii and Unit 731’s monstrous germ warfare program— in particular, the Russian- and Red-Chinese coveted “flea bomb.”

  The microfilm contained the secrets of the infertility virus that had already been successfully test-detonated in its early and less potent forms with devastating results in China.

  The weapon had since been honed with an eye toward use against the West, it had been said.

  But America beat Japan to the most devastating of all punches, avenging Pearl Harbor and all the lives lost since December 1941 with its own unspeakable new weapon that would cast a pall over the world forever more.

  With a snap of his fingers, Truman ordered the first atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, then, just three days later, the second such bomb was turned loose over Nagasaki.

  Japan, and its emperor, crumbled, nearly at a stroke.

  Not so terribly long after, with Japan safely surrendered, there was a special writer’s dinner arranged
, one with journalists, novelists and poets—scribes from the East and the West—united for a kind of literary formalizing of the peace. There, Hector and Ian supped on exotic Japanese fare and drank far too many flasks of belly-warming sake.

  At some point after their dinner, very much in the company of Ian and Hector, the poet Kaneko ostensibly rose to relieve himself.

  The microfilm had been secreted in the spine of a collection of poems by Kaneko gifted to Hector in the restaurant’s restroom.

  Ian started to object, but the poet raised a hand. He said softly, “My dearest Ian, please don’t. We both know in our hearts Britain is all but a spent force in this new dark world. For better or worse, the United States and Russia are clearly the next great powers. Given that reality, the choice is obvious for me and for those whom I represent tonight. You’re too wise and worldly to argue these facts. Your government can request the thing from his.” The poet then nodded at Hector.

  To that point, everything was going perfectly to plan—except, perhaps, from Ian’s patriotic perspective.

  The three men of letters, more than slightly drunk, were headed back to rejoin their fellow writers when they overheard harsh words uttered in Japanese. The obvious threats came from the dining room.

  Uncomprehending, yet knowing that tone, looking to the poet for understanding, Hector and Ian were surprised when Kaneko reached into Hector’s suit coat pocket and reclaimed his gifted book of poetry.

  Looking frantically around, he seized on a curving Japanese sword that hung on the wall.

  The poet drew the samurai sword from its scabbard. Using his shirttails, he wiped the top of the blade clean of its protective film of corrosion-curbing choji oil. He wrapped the precious microfilm around the blade, re-sheathed and then hung the sword just as several masked, Japanese men came upon them, toting guns.

  The writers raised their hands. The masked men searched them meticulously, all the while hurling questions at the Japanese poet.