His English friend sighed. “Please, dear boy. One crisis at a time, Hector. Worry is a dividend paid to disaster before it is due.”
“I don’t suppose you can arrange for some sort of weapons of our own once we reach Japan,” Hector said. “I’m feeling positively naked without my Colt. As you’ve pointed out, we’ve not even left London and we’re already racking up a body count.”
Another tepid smile. Ian set to work fixing a fresh Morland to the end of his cigarette holder. “There, I can at least provide you with some solace,” Ian said. “Clandestine arrangements have been made through channels for some proper tactical support. And, yes, even some armament technical support once we reach Japan. But that’s really all I can say about any of that for the moment.”
“That’s all still pretty cryptic.”
“But nothing in there to fear, Hector. It’s the good sort of intrigue, the sort that gets the tired old blood singing again, yes?” Ian lit up his cigarette and blew a single smoke ring. “Anyway, we’re not completely at our enemies’ mercy. Like any good scorpion, we’re not lacking for some sting.”
Ian hefted his walking stick, then suddenly twisted its handle. Roughly six inches of razor-edged, stainless steel snapped from its end.
A sword cane. Delighted, Ian said, “Have you ever seen the like?”
Hector had been on the receiving end of just such a weapon in 1920s Paris but held his tongue. He reached out to touch its stained, slightly yellowish tip, remarking, “I think your blade needs a brisk cleaning, Ian.”
“Don’t touch it, for God’s sake, Hector!”
Ian quickly pulled the end of the sword cane safely from Hector’s reach.
Ian said sharply, “That’s curare staining the tip, for Christ’s sake.”
8/ No Leg to Stand On
Another airport, another evening departure and yet another interminable international flight. This one was broken up, just a bit, by a brief pit stop in Helsinki.
Hector was sandwiched between Ian and Haven for the duration of both flights. Their neighbor to Ian’s right, completing a row of four, was a fit-looking young Brit in perhaps his early- to mid-thirties, Hector guessed. He also assumed—and he was fairly certain rightly so—the youngish and too-athletic English stranger wasn’t just some fellow traveler in the innocent sense. It was, Hector decided, really just a question of which intelligence organization—or what other shadowy, less-than-government sanctioned coalition—whose interests the stranger served.
There was one improvement, at least, regarding this over-the-ocean flight when measured against Hector’s recent Atlantic passage: nobody was pronounced dead upon arrival, not this time.
***
Ian, leaning hard on what Hector couldn’t regard as other than Ian’s sword cane since he’d learned its true nature, surveyed the concourse with a grimace. “I would have expected to have been met straight away by Dick and Tiger,” he said. “They’re usually the punctual sorts.”
Dick was journalist Richard Joseph “Dikko” Hughes, a robust and balding Australian with a florid face that was fueled by copious drink. Hughes was a noted foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times. He was also known to his phalanx of journalist friends as “His Eminence Cardinal Hughes,” an impertinent bit of nicknaming that had started during the war in North Africa, according to Ian.
Tiger, whose given name was Torao Saito, was another journalist and Fleming friend who worked for the Asahi Shimbun newspaper group, covering aviation when he was not engrossed in the editing of the sprawling annual edition of This is Japan.
Just as Ian lamented their evidently having somehow missed connecting with their local guides, there came a harsh call out to Ian across the concourse. “My God, it’s goddamn Fleming—there’s the insufferable bloke, at last! There’s the profligate prodigal son, returned to Mother Japan and there’s not a naked, knife-wielding white or Asian girl in sight to bid welcome to the daft British bastard who invented Mr. James Bond!”
The two Eastern-based journalists waved and made their way through the crowd. That attention and the imposing Hughes’ bonhomie bluster also brought them a flurry of press attention—Ian at last having been identified to the lurking Japanese media who’d so far missed spotting the tired-looking old British tourist.
Ian greeted Hughes as “Your Grace” amidst hearty black slaps, then the imposing Aussie gripped Hector’s hand and said in a stubbornly enduring accent, “You stick with me, my Yankee son—I’ll see you safely through this passage of Japanese hissing and scraping you’re going to endure the next two weeks. I know Japan like the back of me hand and every glorious inch of me expansive, naked body. You’re another mystery writer, am I right?”
“Crime writer, if you need a label,” Hector corrected, a little coolly, still taking the gruff stranger’s measure. “Or maybe I’m just a novelist who writes about crime.”
“Mystery writer” was a lukewarm term that invariably set Hector to grinding his teeth. It was most often, by design, all too clear in his novels who the villain was, after all. It was the dire dance between the “hero” and the “villain” that nearly always drove Hector’s narratives, not some silly goddamn puzzle or contrived whodunit spun to keep the blue-hairs engaged and feeling good about their own presumed cleverness.
“A fair and important distinction,” Hughes said, redeeming himself. “I expect I’ll love your books, Lassiter. Always enjoy a good thriller or crime story. You know, I formed the Baritsu Society—the first Sherlockian reading club in all of bloody Japan? Yoshida Shigeru—you know, the former prime minister—he’s quietly a member of me club. Maybe we could arrange for you to speak to my society before you dart back west? What say you to that? Yeah?”
“Maybe,” Hector said, sincerely hoping not.
To the good, Hughes and Saito’s efforts that deftly sped Ian through customs also oiled the passage for Hector and Haven once it was known they were part of the 007 creator’s suddenly boisterous and somewhat profane entourage.
For his part, Ian put forth the weathered, bon vivant’s face expected of him, making quips, flashing smiles and giving good quotes to the local newsmen before being whisked off by the two journalists.
As they moved through the airport, they were briefly delayed by a Japanese man on crutches struggling to mount an escalator. The young man, perhaps twenty but surely no older than twenty-five, had a badly burned and scarred face. He was also clearly still trying to master use of an artificial leg.
Shifting his suitcase to his left hand, Hector offered a steadying right to assist the young man in his treacherous passage down the escalator. At the bottom, the author saw the stranger safely off and onto solid footing that elicited a slight head bow and a throaty “Doumo arigatou” in gratitude.
A private car had been arranged for Ian and company, but the unexpected addition of Haven exceeded its capacity. Rather than leave her alone, Hector elected to hang back with Haven. They were left standing at the curb with their bags, awaiting their own cab.
As they stood curbside while a valet went in search of an available ride, Hector looked around for any potential spies other than the comely one at his side. Nobody stood out, but then given the way that Hector—who topped off at a lean six-feet, two inches—found himself towering over virtually everyone in his midst, he realized it wouldn’t be particularly hard to keep tabs on him, even in a bustling Tokyo crowd.
Haven squeezed his arm, turning him to face her and said, “I almost forgot.” She took his hand and slid a gold band on the third finger of his left hand. “Decorum is quite important in this country, Hector.”
She showed him the diamond ring and wedding band she now wore on her left hand. “Please don’t lose that ring, mister—it’s her Majesty’s property so I’ll be needing it back. Until we clear Japanese airspace, I’ll be Haven Lassiter, if that’s acceptable to you. It will just make things so much easier, particularly in terms of shared lodging, as we move in country.”
Hecto
r admired the diamond ring on her hand—it made him look extraordinarily generous, not to mention quite wealthy—and said, “Sounds like very solid strategy, Mrs. Lassiter. You may also be the first woman to actually take my last name, even fleetingly.”
Brinke had stood on Devlin. Subsequent wives also opted to retain their maiden names. But that was okay, really; Hector wasn’t terribly crazy about the name Lassiter, himself.
She smiled and said, “At least it makes the monogramming of towels that much easier.” She bit her lip and said, “This wait for a taxi is ridiculous. I’m going to see if I can’t find us a ride.”
Hector watched her go, at last giving in and reaching for a virgin pack of Pall Malls—the last unopened pack of cigarettes he’d brought over from America. When it was gone, he vowed to himself, he’d not buy another.
Watching the crowd as he fumbled with the cellophane of his cigarette pack, Hector saw the wounded Asian man whom he’d helped down the escalator, moving a bit more easily through the crowd of a sudden.
And—very strange, this—the young man’s right pants leg now flapped emptily in the sultry breeze.
The artificial limb was no longer suspended there.
How very odd, Hector thought. Where in hell had the damned thing gotten to?
Prosthetic limbs were quite expensive so far as Hector knew, and so not the kind of thing one would simply discard or perhaps forget in some airport restroom.
Puzzled, Hector shook his head, then frustrated by the light wind, he turned in the other direction to shield his match from the gusty, balmy breeze. The flint of his vintage, engraved Zippo had proven itself exhausted as he prepared to board the final flight from Helsinki to Japan.
As he moved in this new direction, the hairs rose on the back of his neck.
It was a terrible, grotesque and sinister sight that greeted him.
An artificial leg leaned against a concrete pillar, not two feet from where Hector was now standing.
Instinctively, Hector kicked the artificial limb away, hitting it hard with his toe and sending it spiraling and skittering across the sidewalk, off the curb and under the front end of an idling, late-model Hino Contessa.
Still fearing for the loss of his limbs or life, Hector rolled behind another stout pillar for protection. He simultaneously felt the heat and blast of the resulting explosion before the sound of the munitions-packed artificial limb set his ears to ringing.
Screams and the smell of blasting powder.
The scent of fire and spilled gasoline poisoned the air.
Sprawled half across his battered and well-traveled leather suitcase, Hector looked around, quite dazed and his vision slightly blurred. He felt arms around his torso, then hands at his face.
As she leaned in close to search his eyes, he read Haven’s lips more than heard her desperate, single question: “Are you hurt?”
He couldn’t hear his own voice as he snarled back, “Forget about me, damn it! That boy from inside, the one on crutches—he did this thing! He only has one leg, so get after him now because he can’t possibly get far! Go after that man right now!” Hector shoved Haven away from him, pointing in the direction he’d seen the bastard last headed.
Frowning, Haven turned and ran off after the maimed young Japanese man just as Hector ordered.
9/ Tomorrow Never Lies
Long ago during their first trip to Japan, while discoursing on the subject of kidney stones of all prosaic but miserable maladies, Ian had remarked, “Pain is a private address. Only those who have been that way before know the unlisted number.”
Hector’s palms were scuffed and his knuckles barked from being slammed against the pavement. His back ached and his forehead and right cheek were bruised. One knee was swollen and throbbing. Hector thought he certainly knew pain’s present address, at least on this sorry day.
But it was his ears he most feared for—rather more specifically, he was scared for his future hearing. Gradually, sound was returning to him as Japanese medics fussed over him while local police hurled questions at him he wouldn’t have been able to answer anyway because they were put to him in urgent Japanese.
But, even if his hearing returned to him in full, Hector stewed about longer term woes like tinnitus—the medical term for an infernal, perpetual ringing in the ears that had recently driven an exasperated actor friend to suicide after incurring the condition in the wake of a botched special effects explosion some years ago on a film set.
The condition had steadily worsened in the intervening years, slowly driving the poor bastard mad, then, inevitably to self-murder. Like Hem, his friend had reached for a shotgun to bring back some sought-for sense of serenity.
When Haven returned, pulling aside police and talking to them in what Hector took to be more Japanese, things began to change in a slightly more hopeful way. He was beginning to make out familiar sounds he could recognize and could just make sense of.
The purr of a car’s engine was somehow now improbably delicious, almost as appealing as that of a never-before-encountered species of Japanese bird’s trilling song issuing from a tree limb high above.
Hector was eventually loaded into an ambulance and transported to a close-by hospital for more testing and light treatment of his myriad scrapes and cuts.
At the medical center, an English-speaking doctor assured Hector, who could intelligibly hear the man’s words at last, that he didn’t think there would be long-term effects from the explosion, although he conceded to being more than a bit concerned about the potential for a mild concussion. He urged Hector to avoid any strenuous activity or the imbibing of alcohol for at least twenty-four hours.
The novelist was legally required to exit the hospital in wheelchair much to his chagrin.
Japanese paparazzi flashed away under the canopy of the emergency room entrance as Hector was wheeled to a waiting cab in the manner of some aging, ailing American invalid. Thank God he wouldn’t be able to read the resulting local headlines. And please, God, he told himself, don’t let the bloody wire services back home pick up any of this!
Once in the taxi, he at last got off a single burning question to Haven. He snarled, “Tell me you found the bastard who did this. You did do that, didn’t you?”
Fortunately, nobody had died in the bombing. Hector’s conscience had been spared any luckless bystanders blown to rags or their insides left jellied by the blast’s potentially lethal initial concussion or its resulting shockwave.
The car under which the false leg had actually exploded had been unoccupied, as had another car left flattened when the initial blast flipped the blue Hino Contessa end-over-end, landing squarely on the Fiat parked behind. Both cars burned, then exploded as their fuel tanks were compromised, one after the other.
Sure, nobody innocent had died, but Hector of course wanted the man who did all this to pay, and to so dearly. The sons of bitches had clearly meant to kill him, after all.
“I found him and I didn’t,” Haven said carefully, a hand resting familiarly on Hector’s thigh as they were driven through Tokyo to their hotel. “Yes, I did just that. But he was quite dead when I came upon him, darling. Frothing at the mouth, just like the other in your hotel room. More cyanide, I expect. I’ll know more tomorrow about that when tests come back.” She shook her head. “Whoever is in back of these people, he pulls their strings like a puppet master. They actually kill themselves for this person.”
So it was another dead-end, so to speak. Hector said, “Any idea who or why? Who the hell commands the kind of power to drive these assassins to suicide after taking their best, lethal shot?”
Hector had once faced a kind of suicide cult before, long ago in Paris, so he had some biases in that direction.
Haven solemnly shook her head side-to-side, glistening black hair brushing the collar of her coat. “Not a clue yet. Not a one, I’m sorry to say. But that said, suicide is a prime constituent of the Japanese character, of its culture. It’s hardly a cult thing, you know.”
***
His next lodging place was Tokyo’s newest and most posh—the Hotel Okura Tokyo, opened just a few months before and already a sensation.
Haven saw to their check-in and the moving of their bags to a Western-style room: Given his current aches and pains, Hector firmly dismissed the prospect of “sleeping same as on the goddamn floor” as he put it, despite Haven’s urgings to go native. Standing firm, Hector directed her to secure a non-traditional Japanese room at whatever cost.
Having done that, a still rather shaky Hector detoured two floors up to check on Ian.
As Tiger ushered him into the first of several spacious Fleming suites Hector would encounter over the ensuing couple of weeks, he was again much relieved to find his hearing further improving. Hector could easily enough make out Fleming lecturing, though the subject was that of an increasingly favorite, grim topic—that of decay and of death.
Ian implored someone—Hector presumed it to be Dikko Hughes—“Please don’t lecture me so, dammit. I’d stay home in piss-water England and take all that from She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed if I wanted to hear more of this pointless, hair tearing and handwringing blather about embracing or making do with a half-life. The Iron Crab took his best pass at me last year and missed with his major claw. Inevitably, the Crab will return, and the next time, he will likely succeed. Therefore, in the interval, I mean to enjoy myself to as close to full as I can still manage with my battered vessel. Just living, in and of itself, is really nothing, at any rate. Surely you agree. Most people are unconscious up to seventeen years of age. They are dreaming until twenty-five or so, awake to perhaps the age of thirty-nine, all but mad after the age of forty, and the ones who did it right are properly dead before or soon after the age of sixty.”
Death in the Face Page 8