Hector was never less than conscious of the fact his hands and brain were his primary instruments as a writer. Those parts of himself, at least, he tended to look after.
“Sounds like a plan then,” she said. “Will you trust me to choose your night’s fare?”
“Completely and utterly, I trust you to do just that,” Hector said, very aware of every trace of irony in his answer, but careful not to let any of that awareness seep into his voice or posture, possibly tipping her to his growing skepticism of her alliances.
***
Though he craved a real drink with his meal—particularly since he’d been infected by his comrades with a stubborn sense of doubt regarding his enticing bedmate—he resisted the urge even for sake, instead settling for green tea.
While Haven was a bit more daring with her dinner order, she kept it simple and pleasing for Hector, ordering him misho soup, tempura and rice, and some kuzumochi for dessert.
Before setting down to savor her seafood, she’d taken the trouble to dim the lights in order to better see the bustling, whirl and flickering rush of neon laid out before them. Chopsticks poised for a bite, Haven said pointedly, “It’s not remotely the country you remember, is it?”
“Not by a long shot, no it is not,” Hector said softly, putting down his fork. He turned slowly—a rued concession to his aches and pains—in order to better survey all the light and commerce as he sipped more of his tea. “It was all but laid waste then, of course. It was still just 1945, after all. But, then, London was in ruins, too, courtesy of that other Axis partner.”
“The Germans,” Haven said, unnecessarily.
“Yeah, them.”
“You spent most of World War II in France, didn’t you?”
“Mostly, that’s so,” he said. “Paris and Lyon stayed largely intact. Those were my primary locations at the time. It was only the occupiers of those places that left much to be desired.”
Pointing with her chopsticks she said, “You know, of course, that a lot of people out there right now probably still feel that way about you Americans.”
“And about you British,” Hector said, watching to see how she would take that.
A shrug and a smile. “And us British, of course,” she repeated, “yes. Lord knows, our tentacles around the East once gripped infinitely tighter.” She sipped her ginseng tea, then said, “Maybe, after this mission and when we’re both off the clock, to use Ian’s phrase, we could go to Hong Kong. It’s a good blend of East and West. It’s rather more its own place, in a peculiar, but a good way.”
“Something definitely to think about,” he said.
She moved to refill his tea and he held up a hand. “Thanks, but no, darlin’. I have a feeling that stuff could cost me sleep taken in any significant quantities, particularly at this hour.”
She smiled sadly and said, “You look like you’re in real pain.”
“Just getting sorer as the night gets on,” he said. “Aspirin and sleep will probably do me wonders. It’s like the aftermath of the car accident, you know? You feel it all much more a day or two after the actual event.” Because tomorrow never lies, he thought, haunted by the phrase Ian had placed in his head.
“Your wife—Brinke I mean—and her writings, where are they exactly? Here, or. . .?”
“Nothing so straightforward or so easy to reach,” Hector said, smiling at his first wife’s memory. “Other than New York, Paris and maybe Rome, Brinke wasn’t really one for the more obvious tourist places. She was more the pure explorer. Brinke liked to get to all the best places before the rest of the world knew their names. It’s quite possible she never set foot in this city. To answer your question, her belongings are said to be in a little place called Beppu. Do you know it?”
Haven seemed genuinely fascinated, leaning across the table to take his hand. “I absolutely do not. Oh, I’ve heard of it, sure—it actually is a kind of tourist spot, at least these days. But I’ve never come closing to visiting there. I know next to nothing about this region, not in any real depth.”
The candlelight danced in her dark eyes and burnished her black hair. Once again, Hector was reminded of how much this woman resembled Brinke.
He had a sudden, urgent sense he’d need to watch himself if he somehow succeeded in getting around his mounting aches and pains in order to make love with her this night. The risk of his mind drifting, of his imagining that Haven was in fact Brinke rather than herself—of maybe even calling Haven by the wrong name in a moment of passion—seemed treacherously high.
He realized his index finger was tapping the diamond adorning Haven’s left hand. What was the title of Ian’s earlier Bond book, the one inspired by some long-ago jeweler’s advert copy that had stuck in Ian’s quirky mind?
Oh, yes, Diamonds Are Forever. Diamonds endured, certainly that was true. Far more perishable were those loved ones who drove such eternal stones’ acquisition.
He closed his eyes, trying to visualize Brinke’s diamond ring and its mated golden band. For several years after her death and before eventually remarrying, he had worn them on a chain around his neck. Now they were back home in that vault in New Mexico, stored alongside the venerable old six-shooter the British weapons master had so soundly disparaged just scant hours ago.
Hector did some math, calculating from the year of Brinke’s murder. My God, had so much time really passed in this life without her? In long-ago Cuba, the night of the day of her death, it had seemed inconceivable he would endure the week without Brinke.
The first night he’d returned home alone to Bone Key, he’d slowly, deliberately emptied the Peacemaker of live cartridges and tossed them into his backyard in the dark, fearing he’d put the gun to his own head or against the roof of his mouth, otherwise.
Tonight Hector piercingly felt his age. My God, what was he doing with this stunning, possibly duplicitous, other black-haired and black-eyed beauty—one some twenty or more years his junior?
The same old honey trap.
An axiom suddenly came to him, one of unknown provenance: The chains of habit are too weak to be felt, until they’re too strong to be broken.
Not granted access to his thoughts, Haven, mellow and settling into a sensual languor, stroked his hand. “At least you’re in Japan at its most beautiful time of the year,” she said. “Fall days here are comfortable and clear. The nights are rather cold, but the colors in the gardens and of the trees more than make up for that.”
Hector couldn’t say the topiary even remotely interested him.
And weather? That was just something that happened or typically had to be endured.
He rose and said, “Still hungry, or shall we. . .?” He nodded at the waiting bed. At some point when he hadn’t seen it occur, Haven had invitingly turned down the sheets.
She said, “You’re sure you just don’t want to down a handful of aspirin and sleeping pills and then plunge into oblivion? Just the bruises and cuts I can see now look like they’d be terribly uncomfortable.”
A smile. “I’d certainly like to try for something more than simple sleep.”
“Thank God.” Smiling back, she excused herself as he gathered their plates to set them out in the hallway. “Give me five minutes,” she said.
After checking the locks, he turned to find Haven framed in the window, a sexy silhouette against all that frantic backlighting of downtown Tokyo. She was nude with the exception of a black garter belt, sheer black stockings and her wicked black stilettos.
Hector walked toward her, slowly untying his black knit tie. He dragged it loose from under his shirt collar, wrapping a bit of either end around each fist. He lowered the tie behind her head and then raised it under her bare bottom, pulling her up onto tiptoes and then against himself as he kissed her, fiercely.
This, he assured himself, must surely be the proper improper way to keep a potential enemy closer.
He walked backward as she guided him to the bed, kicking off her heels along the way. She unbuttoned an
d gently pushed his white cotton shirt over his shoulders, gasping softly at the sorry sight of his bruised torso. It was his first time seeing his body in several hours and he was equally appalled by the sorry mottled state of his chest and arms. He expected that still painful knee wouldn’t look much better.
After she finished undressing him, Haven kissed her way down his torso and then spent some time down there as he gathered her long, loosely worn black hair in his fingers. “I like it that you don’t wear your hair up or do all those dubious things to it that women seem driven to try these days,” he said, his voice raw.
Current hair fashions reminded him more of 1950s American cars, all sweep and fins—regrettable architectural arrangements facilitated by too-many cans of hairspray.
“I love your hair lose and natural.” He said it raw-voiced, increasingly fearing he might peak in this way, before he could make her feel wonderful, too.
He urged him up to him and she kissed his mouth, then she eased him back on the bed.
“Life’s too short to take that much trouble with something as silly as hair,” Haven said. As he started to shift on the bed, she shook her head firmly and said, “No, please, just lay on your back. After all, that side of you is the only part that isn’t all freshly beaten up. I’ll do most of the work, I promise. It’s doctor’s orders, after all—nothing strenuous now, not for you. Tonight calls strictly for TLC.”
Straddling Hector, she really did proceed to make love to him, taking charge and quite fiercely at some points. Her uninhibited exertions against his bruised body made this particular act of love all the more piercing for its edgy mix of pleasure and dull pain.
In the low light, with her much longer hair and curvier body, Haven blessedly did not in fact conjure the vivid memories of Brinke he had dreaded. There was something much more exotic about Haven’s looks, something a bit foreign and even feline.
If he was forced to make a comparison to anyone in this moment, he supposed Haven most resembled present-day Natalie Wood—there was something quite similar there in her wide, dark almond-shaped eyes and wide, sultry mouth.
Haven’s animal aggression, her dark good looks and her erotic near-nudity—not to mention the perhaps lethal threat she might pose against him even as she rocked against Hector with a sexy snarl teasing her lips—it was all too much, at last.
When he did climax, Hector did so quite recklessly, still deep inside her, some part of him half-hoping something might come of it.
Haven screamed, peaking with him, collapsing spent and sweat-slicked across him, the weight and pressure of her breasts setting Hector’s bruised chest to a soft, emphatic pulse of dull aching.
They fell asleep just like that, still one.
***
It was the oddest dream. He was there, nude in bed with Haven, still a tangle of limbs and bed sheets, but he was also dressed and at the table by the window, sipping sake and smiling at Brinke whose black hair was now much longer than he had ever seen her wear it in life—every bit as long as Haven’s and then some more, just teasing her tailbone.
His first wife was obviously nude under a short silk Japanese dressing gown. He remembered seeing that gown on many a Key West morning and evening, the same as a lifetime ago.
“She’s quite beautiful,” Brinke said, considering Haven and that Hector on the bed.
“She’s also potentially quite some kind of trouble,” Hector said, considering the same tableau.
Brinke smiled and sipped her warm, Japanese rice wine. “What woman worth anything can’t the same be said of? You know, given less than half a chance, I’d share her with you, if I was still capable. Maybe I’d even take her from you. What do you think about that?”
“I’d prefer the first option, if only for old and tawdrier times’ sake,” he said. “But seriously, some friends think she might mean me real harm, darling. They suspect that she means to be, well, you could say she’s angling to be the death of me, if they’re remotely right.”
His late-wife’s look grew more serious as she took his hand. “You know we all have to die someday. Even you, Hector. In some ways, it gets very lonely this side, waiting for you to at last arrive home.”
Brinke took another long assessment of Haven, sprawled nude and inviting on the bed. She said to him, “And, anyway, surely there are worse ways to go?”
11/ Confessions of a Mask
In concession to Ian’s stubborn, probably misdiagnosed “jet lag”—compounded by Hector’s lingering stiffness from his injuries—the four writers and Haven decided to remain another day in Tokyo before setting out on Ian’s barnstorming tour of The Land of the Rising Sun.
They had finalized a series of points of interest, all of them Ian’s picks of course, and macabre fodder for his new Bond novel. Each site had been carefully selected by Ian because it embodied at least one of the “terrifying manifestations of the horrific Japan.”
Ian now had the notion of ending their shared travels in Beppu.
There, with Ian by his side, Hector would at last claim Brinke Devlin’s long lost writings, if they really existed.
While Ian lazed about the hotel under the watchful, slightly drunken eyes of Dikko and Tiger, Hector at last dared to venture out in daylight for a bit of sightseeing with Haven. He also asked her along for that brief lunch with his fellow writer that had been arranged at the insistence of their shared Japanese publisher.
This was to be his conversation over sashimi and sake with Yukio Mishima, the well-regarded Japanese novelist and sometimes actor who was supposedly becoming harrowingly radicalized as he entered his early middle age.
But before that lunch, as they walked arm and arm through the Rikugien gardens—Haven’s favorite in all of Tokyo, she had confided—Hector was watchful for any threat, making certain she clung to his left arm in case he might need to draw his much smaller but allegedly deadlier new automatic.
He’d kept the Walther’s existence hidden from Haven so far. He’d slept with the PPK under his pillow—a habit dating back to his far bulkier Colt—and he’d put on the holster and quickly covered it with his jacket while his lover dressed in the adjacent room.
But so far, there was no hint of menace. It was simply a bright, clear autumn day in Japan.
Strolling slowly with linked arms through the gardens, she said, “This truly is the best time of year to see all this, Hector. Better still, you’re seeing the city before all the stuff that they’ll do for the 1964 Olympics changes things even more, and almost certainly for the worst.”
Smiling and shaking his head, Hector remembered Gertrude Stein long ago wringing her hands over the probable dire impacts of a now long-forgotten Paris-set Olympics games.
Those eternal circles of history repeating, again.
They stood for a time on the curve of the graceful yet solid Togetsukyo Bridge, taking in the view. The bridge rather reminded Hector of a stone seesaw balanced on a boulder. Standing at just the proper angle on the un-railed crossing, one could evade sight of the skyscrapers and imagine oneself far from civilization, possibly standing somehow outside time itself.
“It’s really quite beautiful,” Hector agreed. “If it was just a bit warmer, it’d be a good place to sit down for a few hours with a notebook and a pen. Seems a fine place for writing but only for writing about gentle, good things.”
Of course that was not the kind of writing typically associated with Hector Lassiter.
After a couple of hours of further traipsing of the winding paths of the park, they at last caught a cab and headed into the Foreign Correspondents Club for their scheduled lunch with the writer who had been born Kimitake Hiraoka.
Hector took Haven’s hand and said, “You’ll translate for me?”
“Surely, if need be,” Haven said. “But I really don’t think it will be required. I’ve seen him interviewed on TV several times. Mishima speaks quite fluent English. And so once again, I’m really looking forward to just sitting back and being a fly on my lover
-writer’s wall.”
***
Yukio Mishima’s brushy black hair was close-cropped; his eyebrows quite bushy. He wasn’t at all tall, but years of bodybuilding and sword handling had put real muscle on the writer, most of it concentrated in his upper torso.
Mishima seemed more initially imposing than maybe he really was—some of his presence had already dimmed now that he was sitting next to much taller Hector.
The Japanese novelist wore casual western-style clothes—dark slacks, loafers and a dark blue sweater over a white shirt, open at the collar.
As Haven had promised, he spoke English quite well, even eloquently, and despite some misgivings about the man’s politics and personal life—Yukio Mishima was long married and had a couple of children, but the writer was widely reputed to be a closeted homosexual—Hector found himself charmed by his Asian peer.
Over a traditional Japanese lunch and more green tea, Mishima shared his frustration with Hector regarding the self-imposed “mask” Japan still presented to the world in the wake of the most recent war.
Commanding Hector’s blue eyes with his own intense, nearly unblinking dark-eyed gaze, Mishima confided, “I think we Japanese still have quite a brutal side, and it’s only thinly hidden now. It’s been hidden far too long since the war, and it now looks for expression. But it’s not good or healthy to have denied it for so long as we have. When it comes out, it will come as an explosion, and I think that explosion is much closer than many of us care to imagine.”
Mishima paused to tap off the ash of a cigarette, thinking some more, then he added, “I don’t like that Japanese culture is now represented only by the flower arrangement, by this false-face notion of a peaceful culture. We still have a strong warrior’s mentality, and it’s just barely cloaked.” A funny smile, then Mishima added, “At least that’s so in some of us. A rare few, maybe. I suppose I feel driven to transcend the currents of history. After all, I come from a samurai ancestry. I revel in its culture in which beauty and death are very much linked.”
Death in the Face Page 10