by Harker Moore
He flexed his chest, admiring the ladder of muscle that descended from pectorals to waist. He’d always used his body to great advantage, especially in his youth, in that second decade after the war in Southeast Asia. In the eighties, he had been part of an elite special ops unit, whose goal was to kidnap members of the Vietnamese politburo and coerce them into revealing the truth about American MIAs and POWs. Although the mission failed, he had gained invaluable knowledge and developed remarkable skills in the service.
It still seemed ironic he’d ended up in the army after he’d dropped out of college. The last place he figured he would have set course was the armed forces, since his stepfather, a man he hated, had been military and had ruled his life with an unyielding authority until he was gratefully shuttled off at eight to his grandfather.
His eyes moved back to the whiter ribbon of flesh that was the scar. No matter how desperately he tried, it was impossible without examining the photographs he’d taken to remember how wonderful life had been those few precious years before the accident. That singular horror of the head, rolling across the floor of the car, eclipsed all other memories.
He touched one of his pale nipples. Since his awakening he’d begun to suspect that there was more than an element of capriciousness in the cycle of death and rebirth that the Fallen had to endure. And he wondered if, in another lifetime, he had been a woman.
But this was to be his last lifetime on Earth. His hand reached out to the image of his face in the glass. “Gad-ri-el …” He drew out the name, moving as he did to the bathroom, to the medicine cabinet, to the vials lined on the shelf like small soldiers. He reached for one, and a package containing a fresh syringe. He tore away the paper and angled the needle into the cap of the bottle. In moments the LSD would take effect, take him down, down into the dark, now-remembered abyss.
CHAPTER
5
Hanae, ignoring her breakfast, sat turned to the window instead. Something about the pressure of the light that came through to her this morning was akin to that internal light that beat behind her lids—a harmony of vibration that kept darkness at bay.
In the two weeks that had now passed since Geoffrey Westlake’s murder, no new victims had been found. But despite, or perhaps because of, this, the media had chosen to concentrate on a lack of police progress in the case. Jimmy’s newspaper crackled as he folded it, the sharpness of the sound an indication of his displeasure. Sometimes he would discuss with her what he’d read that had disturbed him. But today, as with so many days lately, he was silent.
At last she heard the clink of his knife and fork. He was eating his bacon and eggs.
The bacon. The smell of it made her queasy, though less now than when she had removed it from the microwave. She welcomed the nausea as a sign; then with a gentle act of will, she pushed the sickness away and finished her bowl of miso. The proper nutrition was important.
“You did not have to get up this early.” Jimmy’s voice.
She smiled, turning her face toward him. “You were not home for supper last night. I wanted you to have a good breakfast.”
It was Jimmy who rose first, taking the empty dishes to the kitchen. She heard him scraping the plates, putting them into the dishwasher. She got up from the cushion as he came back into the room.
“I’ll try to make it home earlier tonight.” He walked over, bent to place a kiss on her cheek. An American husband.
“I have my class this afternoon,” she said.
“It’s freezing outside.”
“I will be fine. Mr. Romero is picking me up.”
“Good,” he said. Jimmy liked the driver. His fingers, which rested on her shoulder, moved down her arm to touch her hand, and were gone. The outer door closed. She heard his key turn in the lock.
At her side Taiko stirred, claiming her attention. She reached to pat his head. The dog’s increased protectiveness had been one more sign that the miracle she’d long awaited was at last happening inside her. She had as yet said nothing to Jimmy. With the case absorbing so much of his attention, there never seemed a time that was right.
Sakura scanned his notes, then looked up at the members of his Special Homicide Unit who had gathered for this early-morning meeting in his office. The four detectives who made up his regular team acted as a semiautonomous group, functioning inside the Major Case Squad of the Special Investigation Division. At present they formed the nucleus of the task force that had been placed in charge of the triple-murder investigation. Adelia Johnson sat next to Johnny Rozelli, Pat Kelly next to Walt Talbot. However, the seating arrangement was something of a false readout. Johnson was more comfortable with Kelly; the two younger male officers more compatible.
Pat Kelly was the veteran of the group. A cop’s cop who’d worked hundreds of homicides, who as a precinct cop had even seen time on the Son of Sam case. Working homicide, Kelly had once said, scarred a detective for life. Most of Kelly’s scars were visible.
“Well, Lieutenant, think he’s finished? It’s been two weeks since the last one.” A chain-smoker, Kelly rolled an unlit cigarette between his blunt fingers.
“Maybe three was all he had in him.” Sakura riffled through his notes, waiting for Kelly to comment. The fifty-six-year-old had apparently had another sleepless night. The skin under his eyes appeared bruised. Only Kelly’s mind was spared the insults he perpetrated on the rest of his body.
Delia Johnson spoke instead. “You know you don’t believe that, Lieutenant.” The detective had great instincts.
“Maybe we’re not dealing with a serial.” Sakura’s gaze made a round of the table. “Maybe there’s some connection among the victims we’re still missing.”
“They’re all queer, Lieutenant,” said Rozelli. “That’s the only connection. This one’s going to kill again. Just give him some time.” The latest arrival in a long line of Rozelli cops flashed his patented smirk that made even the toughest perps nervous.
“I agree with Johnny,” said Talbot. “I think we’ve got a bona fide serial who’s cooling off.” Talbot, the junior in the unit, had made gold shield after the Kasavettes case. He’d been able to sidestep the nasty window dressing and had gone straight to the heart of the crime. Creative visualization, he’d explained when pressed how he’d solved it.
Sakura hoped the killing was over, but he doubted it. Sometimes serials started to feel they were losing control and attempted to stop acting on the fantasy. Inevitably, they failed and killed again. For the police it became a kind of waiting game. He checked his notes once more and looked up. “I’m concerned with how much is getting out to the media. I don’t like how they latched on so quickly to the ritual aspects of the case.”
“Come on, Lieutenant.” Rozelli was standing, fidgeting with the lapels of his designer sport coat. “They’re just guessing. They got nothing important.”
There was a moment’s silence before Sakura spoke. “We will not allow anyone to take this case away from us.” It was the nasty truth, but the press could be every bit as dangerous as the killer.
Ms. Nguyen had brought dozens of sculptures for Hanae to feel during the first weeks she attended art class. Some were copies, like the Rodin. Others were originals done by Janice Nguyen herself. It was a way of orienting her senses, Ms. Nguyen had said. Hanae complied meekly, not wanting to offend her young instructor’s good intentions. That she had internal vision, that her fingers had been her eyes from the first, Ms. Nguyen might not understand.
Then there came that moment when the instructor walked to Hanae’s table, saw the cool lumps of clay obeying Hanae’s fingers like so many small children. “I’m sorry,” she’d spoken quietly, understanding at last Hanae’s extraordinary abilities. “I was most foolish.”
Hanae frowned now. The clay had a will of its own this afternoon. She pinched the point where the wing joined the body of the bird. Better, she thought, massaging a loose piece of clay between her thumb and middle fingers.
“I’ve been watching you sin
ce I started this class,” his voice came from her right, slightly behind her. “What you do with that clay is amazing.”
Taiko, at her side, beat a tattoo against the hardwood floor. She turned toward the male voice. “Thank you. It is something I enjoy.”
“How long …” He stalled.
“… Have I been blind? Since birth.”
“I guess that was a pretty rude question,” he said. “It’s just that what you do is so remarkable. Birds, huh.”
“I have finches.”
“Sorry, name’s Adrian Lovett.”
“Hanae Sakura.”
“Japanese, right?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t figure you for a native.” He laughed. “Well, I better let you get back to work. Nice meeting you, Hanae…. Did I say that right?”
“Yes.” She felt herself smiling.
Nearly nine P.M. It had been another very long day. Endless paperwork and countless task force meetings. Departmental feathers to be soothed. James Sakura shut his computer down and sat in the relative quiet of his office, trying to work up the energy to go home to his wife as he’d promised.
Three bodies in one week, and now two weeks of hell waiting for the shoe that never dropped. But it would drop. And though he knew it was foolish to put the extra pressure on himself, he could never get over the feeling in these situations that with only a little more police work he could prevent a death. That for somebody out there now who was living and laughing and breathing, the clock was running out.
He sighed. He would leave in a minute. He wanted to be home, in fact, but it seemed so infinitely difficult to pass through the gauntlet of small tasks that were required to get there. So he reached for his headphones instead and hit the button of the Discman. The Red Hot Chili Peppers boomed in his head, blotting everything out.
He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.
Behind the wall of noise lived an eleven-year-old in the last of his boyhood summers. Darkness gathered at the edge of the sea and rolled beyond him into blackness. He stood on the shore, listening to the sound of the surf, feeling already in the cooling ocean breath that first touch of change. Had he, in fact, been its agent? Had there been some fatal magic in his gesture, when kneeling in the sand, he had set his little handmade boats with their daring candles on their imaginary journey to his father?
For only a few weeks after, the summons to America had come. His father had at last prevailed upon his wife to bring his firstborn son into their home.
The story of his father’s second marriage, which had come so quickly after his mother’s death, had been gradually pieced out through the years. Susan was a nurse whom his father had worked with in the course of his medical studies, and they had become friendly after his mother’s death. As his grandmother perceived it, Susan had used his father’s loneliness to trap him and steal his soul. The woman had purposely become pregnant, forcing the honorable Isao to marry her and remain in America with their child.
His grandmother had been very wise, but her vision of her own firstborn was clouded by love. There was truth in her portrayal of his father’s second marriage, but it was not the whole truth. His father was no more a victim than was anyone in this life. If he had strayed from his Tao, was it not his own feet upon the path?
His own belief was that misery was most often self-imposed and certainly contagious. A truth which his eleven-year-old self had been very soon to learn.
The light from them was everywhere, everywhere he looked, thin yellow auras pulsing in the sodden air. No streetlamps needed tonight on Christopher Street. Not for him.
The man found a parking space for the Harley, made sure the side compartment that held his equipment was locked, and walked. The Fallen surrounded him, bumped him, eyed him, but he was alone.
Last night the drug had failed him, calling forth not the glory of the vision he’d regained inside the tunnel but vivid memories of his human life before the accident. Tonight he felt only the pain of loss, belonging nowhere, a creature neither of Heaven nor of Earth. He longed for human comfort. And the peace, no matter how false, of the life he had had before his awakening. He wanted not to know.
But he did know. That there was no happiness that lasted, no love. That the forgetfulness he craved tonight was a trap. That forgetting, that denying his mission, meant dying not once but again and again, reincarnating over and over, with no more chances to escape the flesh he had once desired above all things but was now his prison. This was the war again from before men and time, and he was a warrior, hunting MIAs in another kind of jungle. An irony in a life of ironies.
The bar he went into was filled with the light of the Fallen, but a murky light, dulled by alcohol and drugs, by the lust that was a sign of the real union lost. The dance went on around him, broken and maimed, a sad reflection almost beyond bearing tonight. He bought a whiskey at the bar and walked it to a shadowed table where there was less chance of being approached. He needed to think.
He swallowed half the drink. He had no choice but to go on. The question was how long he could remain safe in this city. He had been careful, but eventually he might make a mistake, especially with Zavebe.
He could get out now, leave the life of this human shell behind. He could move to another city. He had plenty of money from the insurance settlements. But where better for his research than New York? Given his real enemy, the police were gnats.
Gnats with bullets, he reminded himself. This was spiritual war fought on an earthly plane. Capture was unthinkable, a double prison truly beyond his bearing. And his death the most ironic of failures. Still it seemed crazy to consider leaving.
No, he was crazy. But was he? He wished that he were.
He knocked down the last of his drink. Got up. Pushed through the gathered bodies, through the luminescent fog of sickly light and smoke. Back on the street, he headed toward the Harley, giving up the search that was less than halfhearted tonight.
As always the aura of a great one came as a shock—the overwhelming brilliance anchored but uncontained by the black seed of flesh in which it dwelt. The boy at the center of the brightness stood at the edge of the sidewalk. Eyes darting, trolling the cruising cars, he half lounged, half danced along the curb, shopping grimy adolescent cool, as if the thrift shop jacket and dirty jeans were mere affectation.
He made an instant decision, closing the distance between them, heading off the blue Volvo pulling to the curb. The boy, already leaning toward the fleeting invitation of the car, jerked upward toward him in a small moment of anger. But changed his mind and smiled.
Hanae shut her eyes to concentrate the light. A blind woman’s sight carved from darkness. Yet she had trouble focusing. The only illumination she could gather was a thin anemic veil that seemed threatened by shadows hovering just inside the limits of her inner vision.
That she was incapable of drawing in the light probably had to do with the current of complex emotions that flowed through her. She reached and touched the place where the child was growing. Happiness should have ignited the flame inside her. But yet she struggled.
Nori. Nori would ease her mind. At least for a time. She inserted the cassette and listened to the pleasant sounds of her cousin’s Japanese litany as it crackled off the tape. The research trials at the laboratory were going well despite Dr. Murasaki’s interference. Nori had no patience with the male-dominated system that afforded her entrance into the biomedical field only because of her impressive academic achievements.
Murasaki wants me to trade my lab coat for a dark dress that covers my knees. To shuffle behind a husband who will expect nothing beyond the breeding of intelligent children and clever shopping.
Nori at twenty-four was dangerously close to becoming a Christmas cake—an unmarried girl past desirability.
I cannot love Hiroshi. Nori’s tone betrayed an uncommon sadness. My heart yearns to, but my soul will not allow it. Her voice hardened. His words are earnest, but he will become my father, s
hould we marry.
I … Nori faltered. I had a dream.
Hanae moved closer to the machine, her fingers adjusting the volume.
I am walking down a long corridor. There is just enough light so that I do not stumble over my own feet. My shoes make cricket sounds against the floor. I am myself, yet I am not.
A cold, wet wind ruffles a long line of curtains hung on metal rods, but their hems do not touch the floor. I can see that each drape hides a small enclosure. One of the curtains billows, and I see two shoeless feet dangling. I am conscious of my hand pushing against the fabric.
She is young. Her black hair chopped short, with thick bangs covering her brows. Her face is snow white. Her mouth red with thick lipstick. Her head slumps against a naked shoulder, and her tiny body swings against its own weight. Stockings pulled tight by a garter belt cover her plump legs. She is dead, yet her fingers fight the edge of a pale corset, binding her like a kind of orthopedic device. She struggles to cover her exposed vagina.
Tears fall from closed lids. She is clearly embarrassed by the immodesty of her own death, by the shameless display of her body.
I am horrified, but I cannot resist. I push at one curtain after another. Behind each a young woman is hanging, tugging at the corset to hide herself. I accept this as some kind of ritual suicide, but there is ambivalence…. Nori’s sigh. Then, Hanae, what does the dream mean?