Angel Eyes (10 page)

Russell smiled at her. ''Well, I see there's nothing wrong with your imagination.'' He pocketed the tape recorder. ''But to put your mind at ease, I have no idea why Solares took you into the tunnels. In fact, he should have known better, "taking you into a Red Sector was a gross breach of security-and I'm afraid he paid for that breach.''

"No you don't," Tori said. "Don't lay this off on Ariel." She came across the room, stood looking down at him. "You have no idea why he was murdered or even who did it, because if you did, you wouldn't be wasting your time debriefing me." No, she thought, you need me, Russell. That's why you're here. I passed your reentrance exams and now you want me back.

Russell was shaking his head. "What a waste. If only you'd consented to allow our specialists to look after you following the incident. Don't you see, by insisting on your own doctors - Japanese doctors who we could neither vet nor vouch for-you put the entire Mall network in jeopardy. I had no choice but to sever our ties at once. You brought on your own fate with us."

"I did what I had to do in order to save myself," Tori said. "I knew nothing about your specialists, but I did know mine. They are friends, and they are the best at reconstructive surgery."

"That all may well be true, but-"

"You still don't get it, do you?'' Tori shook her head. ''Without this body, without it being able to do everything it did before, I would have been nothing. I would not have been able to live with myself."

"I fully understand your concern for your body. But our people were just as good as your Japanese surgeons, and they had the highest security clearance. Who knows what you could have revealed about the Mail under anesthesia? I had all of my people to think about, not just you."

"Clever," Tori said, "but it's not enough. You used that incident, but that wasn't the real reason you severed me. That's the one thing you haven't lied about. We were like siblings. I was your major competition with Bernard, and you wanted me out of the way, and you got what you wanted because in the end the Mall's like every other place, a bastion of male superiority.''

"Control was never a place for you, you're quite right about that." Russell stood. "But now you're not on any missions, either. That must be a source of considerable pain for you." his eyes were on her. "As far as the hip is concerned-"

''The Japanese surgeons put in a prosthesis of a material that's far superior to human bone. It's ten times more flexible and one hundred times as strong." She gave him a cold smile. "But since you asked, there's no pain on wet days, no unusual friction, nothing that reminds me that the hip had once been shattered. Except that I run, jump, and twist better than I did before the implant."

"In any event, you seem to have gotten out of the tunnels in an ingenious fashion." It was his way of saying he believed her, but at the same time he had confirmed her suspicion that Ariel had been ordered to test her. Under the circumstances, she felt it to be an inadequate victory.

She continued to study him. "You'll never admit that I did the right thing by going to my friends instead of using your people."

"The truth is you made a decision-one of many, I might say-with your emotions instead of your brain," Russell said. "Worse, you could not see the danger in putting yourself in the hands of those not under Mall discipline. I'm afraid you left me no choice."

"How convenient memory can be."

"We all believe what we need to believe, Tori."

"Except for Bernard."

"You give Bernard entirely too much credit," Russell said. "But that's no doubt because Bernard Godwin recruited you. He was your mentor. But, you see, Bernard handed the reins over to me. You never understood that, or never wanted to. You mistrusted me from the outset."

''I detested the callous way you used people.''

Russell smiled at her. "You forget that Bernard Godwin was my mentor, as well."

There was a silence for a time. Tori digested both the tone and the thrust of the conversation. At length she said, "There's really nothing you can say that will change my mind."

"About what?"

"About returning to the Mall."

"That's not why I came here."

' 'Isn't it?'' Tori said. She matched his smile, but all the time her heart was beating fast. "Perhaps you're right. In that case, you've got what you came for."

"Right," Russell said. "Don't want to overstay my welcome."

"You never had one.''

He laughed. "Thanks for the drink. You've been the perfect hostess."

Tori said nothing.

"A bientot," Russell said. Until we meet again.

"That'll be the day."

The library, so cozy and snug in the daytime, was now wreathed in the shadows of evening, made gloomy and depressing by her dream as well as by the onset of night.

Tori sat curled in the huge leather chair, still feeling Russell Slade's presence as if it had somehow been imprinted upon her flesh. For a moment she was suddenly overcome by panic. Her hip! What if Russell had mentioned it to her mother? Tori had never told her parents that she had been injured, or that she had a prosthetic hip. She could imagine Russell saying. It's wonderful that your daughter has fully recovered, Mrs. Nunn. But no, she knew him better than that. Always security-conscious, Russell never said any more than he had to. He was the consummate spy; his lies were largely those of omission.

Feeling a bit calmer, Tori got off the chair, went to the desk. She put her hands on the box Ariel had given her. She opened it once again, took out the color snapshot, stared at it. It was a photo of Ariel, clearly taken recently, perhaps only weeks before he had come down to Buenos Aires. In the background Tori could see trees, walkways, benches, one of San Francisco's small parks. Tori could see Russian Hill in the distance, so the park was close to where Ariel had lived. His face was in partial shade, but it must have been quite sunny because his eyes were crinkled up against the light. He was smiling. Just behind him was what looked like a bronze sundial and, beyond, a child at play. At the edge of the park a couple was walking toward the camera, and a bit closer there was a man in the left-hand corner of the frame. They were all too distant for her to be able to make out their faces.

Tori had studied this photograph endlessly since she had come home, searching for a clue as to what might make it important enough for Ariel, at me point of death, to entrust her with it. But she could find nothing out of the ordinary. It was just a photo of a man in the park. Ariel. Was this the sum total of him, all that might pass for a legacy?

There was a soft knock on the library door, and Laura Nunn entered. "Darling, it's so late. We were waiting dinner for you."

Tori glanced at her watch. ' 'But it's only six-thirty. Mother.''

Laura Nunn smiled. "Seven-thirty. We turned the clocks ahead this morning. It's Daylight Saving Time. Summer's on its way." She cocked her head. "You're hungry aren't you?"

Tori, putting away the mysterious photo of Ariel, said, "As a matter of fact I am."

And speaking of Zen policemen, Tori thought, hours later when she was alone in her room, there was Bernard Godwin, the father figure in her life. She had met him and her life had changed, as if he had been a bolt of lightning, or a Zen policeman.

She was sitting at the art deco vanity-a Christmas gift from her mother-where, years before, Laura Nunn had put ribbons in her hair, tying them just so, the perfect mother making her daughter in her image. Perfect. Tori, running her brush through her thick hair now, shuddered. She stared at herself in the mirror, and remembered . . .

Almost ten years ago she had been, in the current street patois, a wild child-what the society of sixteenth century feudal Japan would have called a ronin-a masterless samurai.

Those were the days when Tori haunted the wicked back streets, the evil bars squatting in the putrid backwaters, bastard splinters of Tokyo's monolithic nature.

There were so many empty spaces in Tori's mind, she could afford little sleep, because in rest she would be forced to look into the emptiness and see, perhaps, what she was not ready to confront. Instead she walked the line closest to the abyss of death in order to prove to herself that she was still alive.

It was inconceivable to her, for instance, that she might be homesick. Oh, she missed Greg, but that was a given for her. It never occurred to her that she might long to see her father again, to gain from him what she never had been able to, a sense of her own worth, a knowledge seen in his eyes, heard in his tone of voice if not directly from his words, that he was proud of her, the way he was proud of Greg. There had never been room for her in a family fixated on continual praise for Gregory Nunn, pilot, astronaut, and it was far less painful to relinquish all hope than to be forever disappointed.

The fact was, had she been able to admit it to herself, Tori would have seen that she loved her father as she loved Greg. Both were extraordinary people in much the same way. But Tori's burning need to be recognized in her own right by her father made it impossible for her to see him with the same objectivity she saw Greg.

In a way, it was odd that she put no blame on her brother for the praise lavished on him. Shouldn't she see it as his fault that when the family spotlight swung on him, it left her in shadow? Yet she did not. Perhaps her love for Greg was so complete that it never occurred to her to hate him. Certainly she envied his relationship with Ellis Nunn, and yet whatever her lack, she saw it as her father's fault, not Greg's.

But, in another way, it was perfectly understandable that she should hold her brother blameless for the excesses of her family. Greg was her lone ally in her skirmishes with her parents, and to exclude him from her life would be to threaten her very existence.

But with Greg gone from Diana's Garden, Tori discovered that her desire to get as far away from Los Angeles as possible overshadowed everything else.

Japan.

Where a fire awaited her, burning in the darkness of her night.

Perhaps sensei discerned the blackness inside her, but if so, he made no comment on it. Sensei was a believer in hard work - in discipline, he once told Tori, is the answer to every problem.

Either he was mistaken or Tori was unable to absorb his teachings deeply enough. In either case, Tori graduated from his arduous course of training-the only woman to make it all the way through-without having successfully confronted the specters within her own night.

This was the state in which Bernard Godwin found her: dangerous, her nerves hair-trigger fine, walking the edge between trouble and death, and getting a hell of a kick out of it.

In fact, when she remembered the moment of her first meeting with Bernard Godwin, what stuck out most was that she had almost gotten him killed.

He had found her in an akachochin called The Happily Ever After. The after-hours club was in the wrong end of Nihonbashi-God knows how Bernard even found it. Walking into the place was like being sucked into a whirlpool in the center of a cesspit.

A Yakuza underboss approximately as large as Godzilla was hitting on her. She didn't mind; she liked his tattoos: flames, everywhere flames, eating gods, demons, mythical animals, and fierce swordsmen with indiscriminate greed. The flames made her think of exorcism, turning filth to oily smoke, purging sacred ground that had been made profane, purifying the night.

Just before Bernard Godwin came down the stairs in The Happily Ever After, she remembered composing the first line of a reply to the letter she had just received from her brother: It's all right, Greg. I'm doing the best I can. Smiling up at Godzilla, the Japanese gangster full of fantastic flames. Yessir, she thought. He's evil, he's nasty, and he's all mine.

Then Bernard Godwin had introduced himself. It was not a happy moment, for either Tori or Godzilla. Neither of them wanted to be interrupted. Then Bernard Godwin said that he had a proposition for Tori, but first she must come away with him out of this place, and all hell broke loose.

Godzilla might have been huge, but he was astonishingly quick. This was his turf, and he was nothing if not intensely territorial. Bernard had muscled in on his property, and Godzilla was enraged. He displayed his displeasure by picking Bernard up in one meat-hook fist and shaking him until Bernard's teeth rattled.

"Stop it!" Tori said.

Godzilla ignored her. A small blade snicked into his left hand. It headed for Bernard's throat.

Tori drove her doubled-up knuckles into Godzilla's sternum while simultaneously smacking him in the groin with her knee. For a moment nothing happened, then Godzilla's eyes began to water, his mouth flopped open, and he dropped Bernard Godwin to the none too clean floor.

Tori knew her exit cue. She grabbed Bernard by the back of the neck and got out of there.

Across town in Roppongi, in an infinitely more savory neighborhood, they entered an all-night sushi restaurant. A sign over the door had imprinted on it the image of a round, spiky fish.

"You 're buying, " Tori said as they sat down. "You owe me."

"It will be a pleasure," Bernard Godwin said, inclining his head in a gesture that seemed both old-fashioned and appropriate. She was surprised that he appeared none the worse for his ordeal.

Tori ordered for them: bowls of baby eels to start, then an assortment of sushi that included abalone, flying fish roe, and sea urchin. Lastly, she ordered broiled fugu. All this was quite deliberate: the Japanese Unique Culture Test. Tori had been subjected to it on her arrival; she saw no reason why she shouldn't subject Bernard Godwin in the same way. She had taken him to one of the restaurants licensed to serve blowfish, which, in the wrong hands, could be lethally poisonous.

They were given hot towels. The hot sake came first, and Tori watched Bernard as he drank his. They were on their second bottle when the baby eels arrived: tiny white things in a clear broth. The eels were without doubt disgusting to look at, but really were quite tasty. Tori ate with gusto, and was mildly disappointed when Bernard dug in without so much as twitching an eyelid. Oh, well, she thought. There's plenty more to come.