Kyoko returned from the dead for this?
Still, Sumida was aware that since the Rialto last night nothing had remained what it had been before. His home in Echo Park was now occupied by another man. His aunt and uncle’s house in South Gate was likewise occupied by strangers. His friend Tony Fortuna (now dead, apparently by Sam’s own hand) hadn’t recognized him. Then there was the gravesite, the newspapers, the public records. . . . So far, the only thing unchanged from what, increasingly, seemed a whole other life, was Czernicek, who’d confessed to being Kyoko’s murderer.
The woman who was now somewhere nearby, alive.
None of it made sense. But Sumida didn’t have to understand how things worked to know what he had to do.
Save his wife.
As he had failed to do before. . . .
And now he stood before the sign that read, “Madame Belinsky—Authentic Gypsy Fortune-Teller.” The attraction was located in a wooden shack on the pier between a blueberry pie stand (closed for the night) and a small storefront that sold sea shells. The fireworks show continued. Sumida tried the doorknob to the tiny enterprise. It turned, unlocked. But when he pushed open the door, it jammed after just a few inches against something on the floor of the interior. He pushed harder. Still, something weighty resisted his efforts. At last, he put his shoulder to the door, leaning into it like it was a tackling sled from his freshman year of football at Wilson High. Had the crowd not been distracted by the firework show’s grand finale, he surely would have had hard questions to answer and dark suspicions to assuage. (“A Jap breaking into a legitimate fortune-telling business?!”) The door edged open an inch at a time as he slowly moved whatever heavy sack of potatoes blocked the entrance inside. As the last of the fireworks exploded, followed by a hearty round of applause from the revelers on the pier and along the midway, Sumida managed to create an opening in the doorway that was just wide enough for him to squeeze through. Once inside, he closed the door so no one could follow.
Now it was pitch dark.
He illuminated the space with his pen-sized flashlight.
It had been no sack of potatoes blocking his entrance, but the bodies of two Asian men, dressed in black, like burglars, who had been piled one atop the other. Sumida gasped for breath. What had he walked into? He knelt beside the men for a closer look. Their faces were battered and bruised. Upon closer examination, not so easy in the dim glow, he noted that their necks bore marks suggesting a narrow-gauge length of chain had been used to strangle both. And the room smelled of blood. Lots of it. More than the dead men’s knocked-out teeth and facial lacerations might explain. A stockyard smell. . . . Standing, Sumida turned and wielded his light before him. That’s when he saw the Gypsy woman face down on a small velvet-covered table. The velvet was soaked through with gore. “Madame Belinsky?” he whispered, though he knew she wouldn’t answer. He forced himself to go to her. Gently, he lifted her head with one hand, holding the light close. Her throat had been slit with something as sharp as a scalpel. The wound was horrid, and he couldn’t help dropping her poor head back to the table, where it thumped on the gooey velvet.
Spade would have treated the poor woman’s corpse better.
But Sumida had never seen carnage like this—never even imagined it. In a Universal Pictures horror film the violence looked so phony that the experience never lost its fun, whatever the monstrous plot. And Picasso’s brilliantly powerful Guernica mythologized violence rather than reproducing it. But this was real. And as Sumida’s adrenalin, which had initially sustained him, began to fade, he felt sick and had to steady himself to keep from vomiting.
What kind of sorry PI paled at violence?
Only then did he wonder: Might the killer still be here?
He removed the .38 from the back waistband of his trousers, his hand trembling. With his other hand, he moved the tiny light in a wide arc.
Aside from the corpses he was alone.
What had happened here and why?
And where was his wife?
Was one of these dead men the Federal agent? He doubted it, as the victims identical attire contradicted the plan for a solitary assailant that he’d read about in the stolen government report.
He swallowed hard. Then he almost laughed, his nerves still badly shaken. Earlier, he had thought things couldn’t get worse for him. Yet now he was virtually trapped in a shack on the Long Beach pier, hundreds of Caucasians wandering outside (a quarter of them likely drunk), with three corpses here and no explanation for his presence among them that would satisfy even the most sympathetic cop or juror. (As if these days there even were such things as sympathetic authorities for his kind.)
The intelligence report about this being the rendezvous point for the agent and the Orchid had to have been wrong. Or perhaps the mission had been aborted due to this violence. In either case, he’d have to move the men’s bodies to squeeze back out the door and distance himself from the crime scene.
He grabbed the first man by the hands and dragged him away from the door.
That’s when he saw it.
A portion of the Turkish rug had been pulled up as he dragged the man across it.
Beneath, a trapdoor.
Excerpt from chapter fourteen of The Orchid and the Secret Agent, a novel by William Thorne
Metropolitan Modern Mysteries, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1945
. . . having piled the beaten and strangled bodies of Shinji and Kento, one of whom had carried the handcuff keys in his pocket, atop one another near the front entrance, then descending through the trapdoor and down the wooden ladder, Jimmy Park stood now on the catwalk beneath the pier. The Jap heavies had been less difficult to defeat than he’d anticipated, his expert Taekwondo moves seeming new to them, which made him wonder if the pair had been intended more as a test of his skills than to actually rough him up. No matter. They were dead now. His mission prospects had improved from being seriously threatened, back when he’d had a gun held to the back of his head, to certain success, as he now saw the Orchid standing thirty yards away, leaning against the catwalk’s wooden railing, her back to him and her attention seemingly focused on the moonlit, rolling breakers not far below. He could put two bullets in her from this distance, one in her head and the other through her back to her heart. But he had a few questions. And, just maybe, he wanted to see her face one more time before he ended her life.
She could not have heard his descent, as the fireworks far above the pier and the waves here below would have concealed the sound of his opening and closing the trapdoor, his feet on the wooden ladder, his cocking the gun. Nonetheless, she turned, calmly and purposefully, as if she knew just the moment he touched down on the three-foot-wide, wooden catwalk, as if she was not in the least surprised to find him unaccompanied by her goons.
Just then, the fireworks stopped.
The Pike crowd roared their appreciation for the aerial display.
Smiling, the Orchid applauded too, even as her eyes bored into his.
He was struck by the timing of the fireworks’ grand finale. Suddenly, it was comparatively quiet down here, even as the ordinary sounds of the midway continued (the calliope, the roller coaster, the hum of myriad voices) and the waves rhythmically washed past the big wooden pylons. Had some invisible stage manager cued the fireworks ending, in anticipation of his leading actress’s opening lines?
Indeed, the Orchid took a step toward Jimmy.
He showed the gun.
She shrugged as if it were nothing. “Do you think it is an accident that we are down here together, just the two of us? Or that you are holding a gun while I am unarmed? Do you think I would have made myself mortally vulnerable to any man, especially one who works clandestinely with the government of the United States, if I did not already know that man’s mind, even if he still does not fully know it himself?”
“I know my mind,” he answered, continuing slowly toward her.
She stopped, leaning against the wooden railing. “I love it down
here, suspended between worlds.” She looked up. “The topside of the pier above, crowded, noisy . . .” Then she looked over the side. “The dark, rolling ocean below, mysterious and unconcerned with humanity . . .” She turned back to Jimmy. “And I, suspended here on these narrow planks, between worlds, at peace in the shadows.”
Jimmy wasn’t taken in by her poetry. If he was distracted by anything it was by trying to figure out the engineering purpose of this catwalk, from which other wooden ladders led up to other trap doors at regular intervals for the entire length of the pier. Suspended by iron poles to the underside of the pier, the catwalk looked like it had been built long ago. Was it used for maintenance of the pylons? No matter. The Orchid had found her use: privacy among a crowd. This same privacy would serve Jimmy’s purpose as well.
“You don’t seem much interested in what I have to say,” she observed. “So why haven’t you already killed me?”
He took a few more steps toward her. “Maybe I wasn’t sure I could hit you from that distance.”
She scoffed. “I know how well you shoot, Jimmy. You could have put one between my eyes from twice that range.”
Between the eyes. Jimmy recalled Mr. Barratt’s instruction.
“Do you know the one thing I don’t like about being down here?” she asked.
He said nothing, but kept his gun aimed at her head.
“It’s that the swirling breezes off the water, so refreshing to exposed flesh, make it quite impossible for a girl to light a cigarette,” she said.
He laughed. “Don’t think I’m going to light one for you.”
“Of course not, Jimmy. Besides, you probably think smoking is unhealthy, being such a straight shooter, if I may use that term colloquially even as you are actually holding a gun on me. Forgive the pun. Now, don’t you want to ask me why I’d put myself in this position, why I’d risk my life on my certainty that, whatever you think now, you will shortly come over to my side?”
He waited.
She waited too, until at last: “If you want an answer, you’ll have to ask,” she said.
“Okay,” he conceded. “Why?”
“Because you’re my brother. By blood.”
He hadn’t expected a whopper like that. He laughed. “That’s the best you can do?”
“Oh, I don’t lack for imagination. I could have come up with more immediately effective arguments for your coming over to my side, Jimmy. But all those other arguments would have lacked one thing. The truth. So, in this instance, I decided to go with that.”
He shook his head dismissively. “So, you’re telling me you’re not Japanese.”
“No, I’m telling you that you are Japanese.” She shrugged. “Well, half.”
He knew the right course was to delay no longer, but to put one between her eyes. But he didn’t pull the trigger, wanting to shame her first. “Go on, sister.”
She shook her head. “If you’re going to treat the premise as if it’s a joke, I would rather you shoot me now.”
“Shoot my own sister?”
“See, a joke,” she snapped. “Pull the damn trigger, you son of a bitch.”
He didn’t.
“Go on, explain yourself,” he said, wiping the sarcasm from his voice.
She folded her hands in front of her as if delivering a speech.
“You were born on February 13, 1911, in Seoul, Korea, which I don’t have to tell you had been annexed the previous year by the Empire of Japan.”
“Thanks for reminding me of my birthday and offering a basic history lesson.”
She ignored him, continuing: “Your mother, Kyung-Sun, and your father, Seung, left Korea without proper Japanese authorization sixteen months later, arriving on these shores and calling upon connections to gain entrance. Here, you became a veritable Andy Hardy, All-American. But have you ever wondered why your parents went to such ends to escape their homeland.”
“Jap occupation, for one,” he answered. “And the promise of America for another.”
She sighed. “I’m sorry to tell you that your mother was assaulted in the first months of the occupation by a Japanese soldier named Himura, which means ‘Scarlet Village,’ resulting in her pregnancy with you. Your adopted, Korean ‘father’ did the honorable thing of marrying Kyung-Sun despite her disgrace. He gave you his name. But you are no Park. You are a Himura, like me. Yes, the soldier was my father. I am not proud of his actions. They were dishonorable. But I am here to make amends with you by welcoming you into your true family as if you were not half-mongrel. No one ever need know. And, together, we will do great things.”
“That’s quite a story.”
She nodded. “We’ll bring honor to our ancestors.”
He stepped closer, having heard enough. “Where you go wrong, my lovely and deadly Orchid, is that I am color-blind, which is an inherited trait. No one in my mother’s family suffers from this minor impairment. But my father, Seung Park, is also color-blind. So, you see, he is my true father, in every way. My color blindness is a personal detail I don’t advertise. Still, you’ve been misinformed. Your researchers dropped the ball, if you’ll forgive an Americanism.”
Her eyes widened in surprise at this turn.
He raised the gun to her forehead. “Give a girl enough rope . . . You have made your final mistake, sister.”
Excerpt from a letter May 25, 1943:
. . . and so, while I appreciate the dramatic ambiguity created by Jimmy’s color-blindness being a brilliant fabrication on his part, such a ruse nonetheless has the effect of allowing for the possibility that he actually might be her half-brother, and I fear we mustn’t indulge the idea that our hero may be half-Japanese. So let’s streamline the scene and make his color-blindness simply true rather than a ruse, removing all doubt and thereby trapping the conniving Orchid in an unequivocal lie. I love that!
Happy note: at the editorial meeting, my colleagues rallied behind the idea that the Orchid has “the potential” to drive an entire series, even as a villain, much as Dr. Fu Manchu has made a boatload of money for author and publisher. Of course, this would depend on the sales of the first book, and so at this time we can’t offer you a contract for a sequel or subsequent titles in a series. But the prospects are good. Isn’t it exciting news, Takumi! Particularly as you’d expressed some hesitation at actually killing off the Orchid. (I think your commercial radar was working in ways you may not even have recognized!)
In any case, we still need to provide a satisfying climax to The Orchid and the Secret Agent. After all, Jimmy Park can’t simply be defeated at the end. But that’s where the Orchid’s ominous bodyguard comes in—the Phantom. Look, with your enlistment coming up in less than a month, and the actual, contracted deadline for the completed draft on the heels of that, I don’t think there’s time to go back and establish rich character details for the Phantom without dislodging the house of cards we’ve constructed. However, the more I think about it, the more I think his being a mysterious figure right up to the end, when his appearance is revealed, against type, to be that of an “ordinary” man, is quite effective. Perhaps as foreshadowing you could put something in earlier about the Phantom’s presumed “man on the street” appearance. Maybe in one of Jimmy’s conversations with Mr. Barratt . . . And if this proves to be the first book in a series about the duel between Jimmy and the Orchid, then our hero’s elimination of her top bodyguard will be, I think, a sufficient and satisfying climax for book #1. Anyway, I know you’ll figure something out, as you always do!
Regardless, there’s no time left for dilly-dallying at Manzanar. (As there surely won’t be any time at the basic training camp they’ll soon be shipping you off to in Mississippi, or wherever you said it was.) So get to it, my talented, and perhaps soon-to-be-famous, author!
Yours Thrilled,
Maxine
THE REVISED—CHAPTER EIGHT cont'd.
Sumida poked his head down through the open trapdoor before descending the ladder. It was a good thing he di
d, as he saw what was happening below and could react accordingly. On a narrow wooden catwalk, suspended ten feet above the surface of the ocean by metal poles attached to the underside of the pier, a man held a gun on a woman. They stood thirty or forty yards from the base of the ladder. The silhouetted man had his back to Sumida. The woman leaned with unexpected languor against the wooden railing—as if she was not even being held at gunpoint. Such sangfroid! Strange, Sumida thought, as his Kyoko was more the nervous type. The two talked, though Sumida could not make out their words. Then clouds parted, or perhaps it was the clearing of the smoke from the fireworks, and now the moonlight reflected off the water. He got a better look at the woman. Her silhouette, slinky in a satin gown, brought to mind Kyoko’s beautiful body, which he had cherished from the moment they’d become clumsy but passionate lovers as seniors in high school. And as his eyes further adjusted to the light he made out the features of her face.
The light still wasn’t ideal.
At this distance, it was difficult to discern details.
Sumida’s mind was clouded from the past twenty-four hours.
All reasons to doubt what he saw . . . but he had no doubt. It was Kyoko. Somehow, she was alive.
He hesitated no longer, but closed the trapdoor quietly behind him and stealthily started down the ladder. He knew Kyoko could see his descent. But she didn’t give him up to the man with the gun. Instead, she kept talking, maybe stalling for time to allow Sumida to get into position.
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