Death in the Face

by Craig McDonald

  Hector realized the blast had struck Kida below the knees, essentially atomizing the man’s lower legs. More disturbing to Hector was his realization the rickety bridge upon which he stood uncertainly was also beginning to collapse under them.

  The bridge’s strengthening arch had not just been compromised by the bogus cigarette pack’s explosion, but severed.

  With its center now gone, the bridge’s isolated, surviving spans were overwhelming their failing anchors and moorings at either end of the crocodile pool.

  Hector immediately began running back toward the now-missing section of the failing bridge, determined to hurdle the three- or four-foot gap in order to reach the other side and continue his dash to safety before the entire structure collapsed into the now frenzied crocodile pool chummed with so much Sumo blood.

  But Hector fell perilously short of his goal. To his horror, his hands slapped the far side of the severed bridge just as its ragged edge splashed into the crocodile pool. He was in the water up to his knees.

  There was another terrible commotion as the twisted knot of crocs sprang to thrashing life, darting with lashing tails toward the tendrils of blood spreading out across the smoking surface of the water from the remains of the Sumo wrestlers’ ruined bodies and the new turmoil created by the bridge’s final collapse.

  Somehow, Hector managed to get one foot squarely planted upon the back of Mr. Kida, who was still thrashing around, trying to grab hold of the bridge himself even as he bled out from his terrible leg wounds.

  Hector used that fleeting purchase to push himself back up the edge of the sinking bridge. He managed to grasp one of the now-sideways rail supports, hauling his feet out of the water just as a large crocodile took a surging snap at Hector’s dangling legs. Hector booted the thing in its sensitive eye sockets with his heel.

  In a kind of terrified frenzy, Hector grabbed another “rung” and hauled himself further up the ruined bridge that had now become a kind of makeshift ladder, slanting, as it did, at a near forty-five degree angle into the bloody, steaming pool of feasting reptiles.

  From somewhere above, Hector heard bending nails and rending screws—a rusty groaning as the compromised remains of the dry-rotted bridge threatened to pull loose from their last moorings to crash into the deadly pool.

  Hector at last hauled himself up to safety, rolling onto an adjacent, and intact catwalk just as the last of the bridge gave way.

  Standing atop that surviving pathway, panting and doubled-over—hands on knees and still trying desperately to get his breath—Hector listened as Mr. Kida gave a last, terrible shriek, then was dragged under the surface by countless, impossible-to-escape and tightly clutching jaws.

  There were more terrible thrashing and belching noises from the crocodiles as they gorged on their unscheduled evening meal.

  Weak-kneed and shaking, Hector surveyed himself. There was no blood to be seen, but his pants were soaked below the knee. Of course his shoes were sodden, too. But that hardly mattered with the mounting rain.

  The important thing was that he was still alive and so still dangerous to the one-armed man he meant to revenge himself upon this bloody and rainy night.

  Shivering in the quickening downpour, Hector realized the keys to the little car that had brought him to this terrible place were in the pockets of one of the men now roiling in the stomach juices of God-only-knew how many of those giant carnivorous reptiles gorging down there.

  But that didn’t really matter, either: His old friend Jimmy Hanrahan had long-ago schooled Hector in the art of hot-wiring cars.

  So long as he remembered to drive on the proper side of the road, Hector was fairly confident he could find his way back to the health clinic where Béla Herczog would be expecting the little car to return to him with his killer Sumo inside.

  Yes, this was Hector’s instinctive plan of action: He would drive straight back into the belly of the best.

  Once there, he would put the son of a bitch Herczog down for all-day and then some more.

  6 / To Hell and Gone

  After just a few false turns in the driving rain, Hector eventually found his way back to the Hell’s Gate Spa.

  As he approached the imposing wrought iron fence, invisible electric eyes tripped on an array of floodlights, bathing the approaching vehicle in white light. Hector pulled his coat collar up to obscure his face and waited for someone inside to push the button to open the gate for the familiar car.

  Several nerve-rattling moments of silence and motionlessness ensued. Hector began to fear he’d be flanked with men with guns, maybe more retired Sumo.

  With a groan and a clang, the gate suddenly separated at its center and swung inward with a continuing muted squeak from its corroded hinges.

  Gusting rain blanketed the windshield. Hector resisted turning on the wipers—that would only give a clearer view of the interior and probably of his face. It would likely make it equally clear that where three had left in the cramped little car, only one was returning.

  Palming the wheel with his left hand, he followed the winding path leading to the five-story white and black turreted garrison. Hector reached into the glove compartment and retrieved the American gun given him by the CIA agent—the gun he’d seen Mr. Kida stash there on the ride over. His Walther was somewhere in the croc pool, now.

  So much for playing James Bond manqué tonight, he chided himself.

  A lone figured draped in a dark wind-whipped kimono was standing in front of the castle under an umbrella, waiting for his minions to return. One kimono sleeve whipped wilder in the wind—that nearly empty right sleeve. Clearly, it was Herczog, and just as clearly he was confident enough in his Sumos’ effectiveness and loyalty to feel comfortable greeting them in solitude.

  That was a lucky break for Hector. He’d heard enough about these places to know the last thing he needed was for Béla Herczog to escape back into his yamajiro’s central keep—surrounded as it likely would be with tell-tale nightingale floors and the Japanese variation of bone-breaking oubliettes—see-saw floors to drop the unwary into a pit, or perhaps instead depositing them upon a waiting nest of clustered and sharpened bamboo staves. . . . Or, maybe it would just deposit the unwary into some chute ending in a white-hot fumarole.

  As he palmed the wheel, taking another brief and meandering curve away from the castle, Hector activated the little car’s high beams, hoping to make it that much harder for Herczog to make out shapes or silhouettes in the absurd little Toyota.

  The figure framed in the headlights bowed, squinting against the cold rain and called out, “It is done? Lassiter is no more?”

  Hector hauled himself out of the little car, the gun gripped in his left hand. It only took at instant for Herczog to realize the biggish man at the wheel was not one of his hulking ex-Sumo celebrities-turned-enforcers.

  Béla Herczog let out an inhuman shriek and pulled something from under his kimono. Hector, despite holding his gun in his left hand, fired first.

  Another yell—Herczog’s gun struck the ground and then went off, taking out one of the Toyota’s headlights.

  Hector gave chase in the bracing rain. He fired a warning shot as the other man started to drift toward the stairs and the entrance of his castle. Hector once again figured if Herczog made it inside, his own odds of ending up maimed or dead increased geometrically.

  Snarling, Herczog veered left into shadows, slipper-clad feet crunching on manicured gravel. He was leading Hector into his maze-like garden that weaved between all those stinking and scalding fumaroles, probably hoping Hector, unfamiliar with the path in the dark would stumble into one of the pits to be instantly incinerated.

  Herczog screamed out, “That shot you fired will bring more of my men, Lassiter. Leave now—run, and you may yet live.”

  Hector dismissed that threat. The rain was so heavy the sound of any shot would be lost under its infernal pounding—assuming anyone else was actually roaming the grounds of Herczog’s castle, which Hector sin
cerely doubted.

  Before he might lose sight of him in the dark, Hector took aim at the man’s left shoulder—he’d have gone for a leg or a hip if that black kimono didn’t obscure such close targeting—and squeezed off another round.

  There was a terrible squeal and the man pitched forward onto a gravel path between two steaming fumaroles.

  The rain had also increased the density of the steam plumes coming off the lava pits and Hector briefly lost sight of the man in the low-hanging fog when he hit the gravel: he instead followed the sound of the man’s five clawing fingers and his madly scraping feet.

  As he drew closer to the bald man’s figure emerging from the mists, Béla Herczog rolled onto his back, groaning, and tried to lash out at Hector with his feet. The one-armed man snarled, “You have no authority here! You shot me in my home! The Japanese police will—”

  No patience for any of that, Hector took aim between the man’s eyes, then shifted a foot to the right and pulled the trigger, kicking up pebbles next to the man’s head.

  “Please,” Hector said, “this is no citizen’s arrest. This is simply a public service, as far as I’m concerned. Loose ends from the last war.”

  He reached down and knotted his fingers in the man’s sodden kimono, hauling him to unsteady feet.

  Sensing what was coming, Herczog said again, “You can’t possibly dare to do this! I have important friends, not just here, but also back home in Hungary!”

  Hector was having none of that. “I thought this country was your home—your home of choice. Anyway, this isn’t a trial, and I’m not interested in playing judge, either. Only executioner.”

  Hector gripped the man by his wounded left shoulder, eliciting another sharp scream. Herczog took his last shot: “If you do anything to me, Haven will never forgive you, Lassiter! And I still have my men, watching your friends back home—have you forgotten that?”

  Hector just shook his head. “You say that about Haven like it still matters to me. And even if it did, you already made it clear you mean her dead, too. As to your threats against my friends? I’m choosing to embrace that ancient strategic philosophy of cutting off the snake’s head, then simply standing back as its body whips and dies. And anyway, the CIA is now watching those of yours who are watching mine. But, all that aside, there’s that one other, immutable truth, Béla.”

  His chin trembling, Herczog stammered, “Wh-what other truth?”

  “We have a pithy saying back home,” Hector said. “No body, no crime.”

  Hector gave that a solid second to sink in, then he straight-armed the man in the Oriental robe.

  Tipping back on heels, his wounded left arm wind-milling, Béla Herczog toppled into the larger of the two steaming sulfur pits at either side of the gravel path.

  Hector quickly retreated several steps to avoid the burning and sulfurous backsplash as the man plunged, screaming, into a hissing bluish fumarole.

  There was a terrible burping noise, then a fresh burst of steam billowed from the hole that ran to the center of the earth.

  Standing over the steaming cloud, Hector lowered his gun and took a last look around to make certain no guard or sentry had perhaps heard any of the gunshots or the high-pitched screams as the terrible man made his way down into his private Hell.

  Although satisfied he at last had the place truly to himself, Hector still resisted the temptation to penetrate the almost certainly booby-trapped and fortified lair of the Black Dragon Club leader.

  Instead, blinking back the rain, Hector returned to the ridiculous little Toyota. He was intent upon going in search of his hotel, a hot shower and another solid, Western-style drink.

  Driving through the bucketing rain, Hector thought of the sound and the smell of the man catching fire as he sank down into the sulfurous hell mouth.

  A quote by Mark Twain he’d been tasked to memorize in grade school suddenly came to Hector: “Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for company.”

  7 / Out of Japan

  Mitsuharu Kaneko, now gray-haired and his face heavily lined and weathered, was not the large-living, woman-obsessed intellectual of the mid-1940s that Hector fondly recalled.

  The sixty-seven-year-old poet had just ordered another round of sake. He was expounding on his poet’s life—reminiscing about his explanation to a recent interviewer regarding the unending life-of-the-wits existence he baldly perceived himself exemplifying.

  “We marvel how we’ve been able to spend our life with an unexpected line of work,” he said, “but realizing that we’ve reached such an age as to be able to do anything about it even if we thought about it, we decide to compel ourselves to find something worthwhile, albeit reluctantly, in the years ahead of the life we didn’t want. That’s what we usually do. There’s something about us human beings that is piteous and lovely.”

  Trying to get his head around that observation, Hector studied the old poet in polite glances.

  So far as he knew the man’s biography, Kaneko struck Hector as a Japanese Orson Welles of a sorts: an other-worldly prodigy who’d dropped out of countless schools and abandoned many educational disciplines and paths—eventually actually painting pornography for a time to fund his travels—all that before finding his poet’s voice. The Japanese poet seemed to Hector the most consummate of autodidacts.

  “This I truly believe,” Kaneko said. “To oppose is the only fine thing in life. To oppose is to live. To oppose is to get a grip on the very self. When I’m in the east, I want to go to the west. My greatest hate is all people feeling the same.”

  So far, Kaneko had charmingly and stubbornly deflected all of Hector’s attempts to discuss Brinke’s writings and his questions regarding their possible whereabouts. For his part, Hector had been able to maintain some semblance of civility, but his patience was waning, his self-control eroding under the steady assault of the Japanese liquor and all of the unsought philosophical insights.

  As if to underscore that fact, Ian hefted his cup and said, “The man drinks the first flask of sake. The first flask drinks the second. Then, the sake drinks the man.”

  With grandiose seriousness, Ian rose and, leaning on his cane, excused himself to seek the restroom. Dikko followed along, majestically focused on not falling as he drunkenly trailed Ian.

  When it was just the poet, Tiger and Hector, Kaneko’s manner abruptly changed. He leaned forward and said very seriously, “I sincerely apologize for what I felt I had to do regarding your wife’s writings, my friend. I had to take drastic action when you disappeared for those several hours after having been kidnapped just a few days before. All the evil in the world seemed suddenly centered here in Beppu and I felt I simply had to do something momentous to protect this terrible secret. Japan should not have this weapon. We proved ourselves capable of the greatest treachery with our surprise attack on your country in 1941, Mr. Lassiter. It was a terrible perversion of Bushido Code. Our conduct during the war, and our treatment of your prisoners hardly distinguished us.” He raised his bushy eyebrows. “Too many who caused all that, or who apologize for it, still have positions of influence and power, I am sorry to confess.”

  “I appreciate you saying that,” Hector said. “But this man Herczog is dead, and by my hand. I watched him burn. Brinke’s writings are very important to me; they are important in ways I can’t express.” Hector shook his head and said, “I was supposed to meet an inn keeper and claim them. This seemed so easy and straightforward. How did you come to have control of my wife’s writings?” Hector couldn’t keep a hint of menace from his tone.

  “It is not so straightforward, not at all,” Kaneko said. “Miss Devlin’s writings were never really in that inn-keepers hands, you see. Not really. The writing was undertaken when Miss Devlin was a guest of mine, during the early 1920s. I believe it was 1924. We knew each other from a time even earlier than that. She was always something of an Orientalist, I’d guess you might say. Our Brinke was seeking sanctuary after fleeing Paris, hiding from some murderous fel
low writer, she claimed. So she lived with me for a time. She knew she could trust me and that I’d protect her, as I had similarly done many years before.”

  He let that hang there.

  Hector resisted the urge to inquire if he was implying they’d been intimate. Like Hector, the poet had that certain reputation as a great lover of women. Kaneko said, “The innkeeper was a kind of middle-man, in the parlance of your country. I desperately wanted you to claim this terrible thing and give it to your government, Mr. Lassiter. All those years ago, Brinke painted a very intoxicating picture in my head of the kind of man you are. Reading your books in translation in the intervening years secured that image in my mind. It set me on a course, a path I’m still committed too. Particularly as I’ve watched the British sink steadily in importance, stature and competence. I quite deliberately decided to use Miss Devlin’s writings as a means of insuring your particular cooperation.

  “You see, when I at last met you in the flesh, in 1945, you impressed me, very much so,” he said. “I thought then of confiding to you about our mutual friend—our exceptional Miss Devlin. I’m sure we would have got to that and her writings would likely have become yours in due course all those years ago. But events with the microfilm’s loss overtook us. And you and I are of similar nomadic impulses. Time passed. When the microfilm was at last recovered I saw a fresh chance. It is now hidden among Brinke Devlin’s posthumous writings that I have held for so many years. I choose this moment to tell you that to ensure you’ll take the necessary next and last step required to claim the writing, and the microfilm. I choose this precise moment to tell you all this in order to spare Ian’s ego. He’s an apologist and champion of his country—it positively screams through as such in his writing. But Britain is a spent force, and one now riddled with enemy agents and provocateurs. And everyone but everyone wants this terrible secret.”

  Hector said testily, “So why not simply ring up the CIA and offer this thing to them, straight up?”