Tengu (22 page)

Mr. Esmeralda
pushed his plate away, then changed his mind and drew it back again, so that he
could fork up a last piece of beef. He kept his eyes on his food and spoke to
Gerard lightly, almost absent-mindedly. “The very first day I approached you,
Mr. Crowley, I warned you that you had very little option but to do as you were
told. I also warned you not to question my instructions.”

“Maybe you did.
But now I’m questioning.”

“My clients
will not be happy about that,” smiled Mr. Esmeralda. “They’re very particular
people when it comes to secrecy and security.”

Gerard snapped
his fingers at the waiter and said, “Scotch.” Then he folded his arms and
leaned forward across the table. “Death comes at a pretty high price in
California, Mr. Esmeralda, and I’m beginning to think that perhaps you’re not
paying enough for it.”

“You know what
your reward will be when the Tengu program is completed.”

“A million six?
I’m beginning to wonder whether it’s worth
it. I’m also beginning to wonder if you’ve really been giving me the whole
picture about these so-called bodyguards.”

Mr. Esmeralda
watched Gerard caiefully. “It does not pay, in your business, Mr. Crowley, to
be too curious.”

“Is that a
statement or a warning?”

“What do you
think?”

“I think it
sounds like a warning, Mr. Esmeralda, and I also think that I’m beginning to
get a hook into you the same way you’ve got a hook into me. There’s such a
thing as plea bargaining, you know; and if I were to make a clean breast of
everything I happen to know about Sherry Cantor’s death to the police...
 
well, there’s a good chance that I wouldn’t
get more than one-to-three.”

“You are not
deceiving me for one instant, Mr. Crowley.” Mr. Esmeralda smiled. “Go out to
the ranch tomorrow with Kemo and pick up the Tengu. Doctor Gempaku will be
waiting for you.

Oh–and by the
way, we are expecting a new consignment of volunteers on Monday from Kyoto. I
will let you know the details tomorrow morning.
Fifteen of
them.
So you can see that the bodyguard program is actually getting
under way.”

“I think I’m
dreaming this,” said Gerard.

“No,” said Mr.
Esmeralda, and nodded to the waiter as his dessert–platanos fritos–was set in
front of him. “It’s not a dream. It’s simply a manifestation of the peculiar
violence inherent in modern living. The world is in imbalance.
Mr. Crowley, between those who have and those who want; and the
greater the imbalance, the more violent the confrontation between the two.
The people who have the most will always be the prime targets for the people
who have the least; and that is why they will pay anything for one of our
Tengus. The ultimate weapon is personal security–that is how we are going to
advertise them.”

Gerard swilled
his Scotch around in his glass. “I don’t believe you, Mr. Esmeralda.
Something’s happening here.
Some really big caper that you’re
not telling me about.
And, you take notice, sooner or later I’m going to
find out what it is.”

“I have already
taken that into account,” said Mr. Esmeralda, thinking of Evie–drunk, in her
underwear.

“Well, you take
notice,” Gerard repeated. “I’m on to you, and if you start pushing me too hard,
you’re going to regret it. I suspected you from the start. This Tengu thing–if
it’s such a big secret, why did you tell me so much about it, right from the
beginning? This killer-bodyguard story–it’s just that, a story. If that was all
there was to it, you wouldn’t have told me anything about it. But you’ve told
me everything. You’ve answered every question I might have had about it, even
before I’ve asked them. And that smells to me like a decoy.”

“You are
drunk,” said Mr. Esmeralda. “Why don’t you go away now, nurse your hangover,
and think about it again in the morning?”

“Oh, don’t
worry,” said Gerard. “I’ll do what you want me to do. I’ll take out this Thorson
character. I’ll take him out like a dream. That’s always provided the Tengu
behaves himself, and goes to the correct address. But take notice that I’m on
to you, Mr. Esmeralda. Too much pushing from you, and it’s plea-bargain time.”
Mr. Esmeralda glanced around the restaurant to make sure that nobody was
listening. “You’ve talked to Nancy?”

Gerard nodded.
“Nancy is an interesting lady. More interesting than I first understood.”

“Beware of
Nancy Shiranuka,” said Mr. Esmeralda. “Nancy Shiranuka is by no means
everything she appears to be.” Mr. Esmeralda ate some of his fried bananas in
silence. Then he said, “Mr.

Crowley, have
you ever heard of a Japanese demon called Kappa?”

“You’re the
second person who’s talked to me about Japanese demons tonight.”

“Nancy
Shiranuka mentioned them?”

“Nancy
Shiranuka’s an expert, as far as I can gather. And, yes, she did mention a
demon called Kappa. Some kind of water demon, isn’t it?”

Mr. Esmeralda
nodded. “A small, hideous creature with the limbs of a variety of different
creatures, like lobsters and rabbits, all mixed up.
A huge,
saucer-shaped head.
I looked it up in the Huntington Library.”

“Why did you do
that, Mr. Esmeralda?”

Mr. Esmeralda
put down his spoon and laced his fingers together. The band in the restaurant
was playing “Samba Pa Ti.”

“No particular
reason. The Tengu, as you know, is named after a Japanese devil. I suppose I
was just curious.’’

“I thought you
said that curiosity didn’t pay in this business, Mr. Esmeralda.”

“Maybe.
It depends on the circumstances. But the Kappa is a
particularly interesting demon because it has one fundamental weakness.”

“What’s that,
Mr. Esmeralda?” Gerard took out a cigar and clipped the end off it, watching
Mr.

Esmeralda all the time.

“In its
saucer-shaped head, the Kappa keeps a quantity of water, magical water which
gives it its strength. The way to defeat the Kappa is to approach it without
fear, bow to it, and say, ‘Good morning.’ In accordance with Japanese custom,
it will bow in return, and it will spill the water out of the top of its head,
thereby weakening itself so much that you can pass by unscathed.”

Gerard’s
expression was concealed for a moment behind curls of blue cigar smoke. Then he
spat out a fragment of leaf and said, “What are you trying to tell me, Mr.
Esmeralda?”

“I am giving
you a chance to save yourself,” said Mr. Esmeralda. “I am telling you that the
way in which you can survive in this particular adventure is to remain calm and
polite, and to observe all the necessary courtesies.”

“In other words?”

Mr. Esmeralda
raised a single warning finger. “In other words, Mr. Crowley, you are in danger
of your life, and you ought to be aware of it.”

Gerard thought
about that, and then crossed his legs and sniffed. “What are those bananas
like?” he asked Mr. Esmeralda.

W
hen Mr. Esmeralda left Inca’s restaurant at 11:17 P.M., a little
over a half-hour after Gerard Crowley’s departure, he was watched intently from
the shadows of Inca’s parking lot by Nancy Shiranuka’s houseboy, Kemo. Kemo had
been sitting patiently in his red-striped Toyota for almost three hours,
smoking menthol cigarettes and listening to a tape of Stomo Yamashta. As soon
as Mr. Esmeralda appeared, white-suited, his hair shining in the neon light of
a Los Angeles night, Kemo started up his engine and crushed out his latest
cigarette.

Mr. Esmeralda’s
metallic-blue Lincoln appeared from Tengu the darkness on the other side of the
parking lot, with Kuan-yin at the wheel, and Mr. Esmeralda climbed quickly in.
The Lincoln then swerved north on Berendo, with a squeal of tires, and ran two
red lights on its way to Beverly Boulevard. Kemo, alert and sweating, took a
fast right at 3rd Street, then a left at White House Place, and managed to end
up only two cars behind the Lincoln as it turned west on Beverly Boulevard and
cruised through the Wilshire Country Club toward Highland Avenue.

Only one car
apart, the Lincoln and the Toyota sped north to Laurel Canyon. Kemo was tense
and sweating as he drove, although the Toyota’s air conditioning was set to
cold, and whenever he was forced to slow down, his fingers drummed impatiently
on the wheel.

Follow him
closely, Nancy Shiranuka had ordered Kemo. Follow him and
don’(
let
him go.

At last,
unexpectedly, just past Lookout Mountain Avenue, the Lincoln screeched off to
the right without making a signal. Kemo, who was being tailgated by an
impatient procession of home-going valley-dwellers, was forced to drive on for
another few hundred yards and make a right at Willow Glen. He parked his Toyota
close to the side of the road and climbed
out,
looking
nervously from right to left to make sure nobody had seen him. But why should
anyone have seen him?
he
asked himself. He was nothing
more than one more pair of headlights in a night bustling with headlights. He
wished he could suppress the fear which kept rising inside him; the feeling
that death was very close at hand.

Running
silently on rope-soled slippers, Kemo went back down Laurel as far as the
driveway where the Lincoln had turned off. There were no signs there, no house
numbers; only a mailbox with its flap hanging down and an overgrown hedge of
bougainvillea. Kemo squinted up through the trees and saw a large wooden house
in which two or three lights were shining. He also glimpsed, for an instant,
the Lincoln’s taillights, before Kuan-yin switched them off. He glanced back up
the road to make sure that nobody had been following him; and then, momentarily
concealed by the darkness between two passing cars, he rolled over sideways
into the shrubbery.

It took him
nearly a quarter of an hour to get close to the side of the house. He crept
through roots and foilage as silently and unobtrusively as a lizard. He noted
each of the television cameras as they emotionlessly inspected the driveway and
the surrounding bushes; and he also noted Mr. Esmeralda’s Chinese driver,
waiting in his Lincoln limousine. She was listening to Barry Manilow on the
radio.

At last, he
reached the concrete pilings on the south side of the house, well hidden in
darkness, and he lay there panting quietly for a minute or two before he went
on. Then he skirted around the house to the back, where a wide patio had been
cantilevered out of the side of the canyon, with huge terra-cotta pots on
either side, and where a silent fountain collected leaves and lichen.

He ran and
tumbled from one side of the patio to the other, until he reached the corner of
the house. Kemo was an adept in judo and in the specialized art of Noma-oi, the
“wild horses,” in which an opponent was overwhelmed by a barrage of blows so
fast and violent that he looked afterward as if he had been run down by a herd
of horses. Kemo was silent and quick and strong. He had killed a sailor once,
in a bar on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, with a flurry of blows that
nobody else in the bar had even seen. But Nancy Shiranuka had chosen him more
because he was quiet and self-controlled, and because he could cook
exquisitely, and because he had disciplined himself to make love for hours and
hours on end without reaching a climax.

With Kemo,
Nancy had reached what she described as “the state of the angels.”

Kemo waited at
the back of the house on Laurel Canyon for almost ten minutes. Then, silently,
he shinned up the drainpipe to the guttering that surrounded the first-floor
balcony, and swung
himself
over the cedar railings.
The wide sliding doors to the back bedroom were open a Tengu quarter of an
inch, and Kemo slipped his fingers into the crevice and slid them back just
enough to allow him to slip inside. The bedroom was bare, no drapes and no
furnishings, only a futon on the floor for someone to sleep on. There was a
smell of candles and incense–a smell that reminded Kemo of Japanese shrines–and
something else.
A bitter aroma of death.
Kemo waited,
motionless. His hearing was so acute that he could detect the suppressed sound
of someone holding his breath. He decided that it was safe for him to move
quickly forward to the bedroom door.

With infinite
care and in utter silence, he opened the door and stepped out onto the landing.

From here, he
could see down into the hallway where Mr. Esmcralda had waited only the day
before. Mr. Esmeralda was there again now, his hands in his pockets, sweating
in the light of the candles which flickered along the side of every wall. Kemo
stared down at Mr. Esmeralda,
then
slipped silently
along the landing to the stairs, keeping himself well back against the wall.

It took Kemo
nearly five minutes to descend the staircase in total silence. He tested every
one of the cedar treads before he put his weight on it, and then he stepped
down so gradually and with such
care that not even
the
molecules in the wood were disturbed. Mr. Esmeralda was still waiting
impatiently in the hall, but Kemo passed him by, only eight or nine feet away,
treading as silently and swiftly as a draft. Mr. Esmeralda was not even
conscious of his passage. It was a Noma-oi technique known as “unseen shadows.”

Kemo found
himself in a long corridor. To his left was the kitchen: he could detect the
smell of Eutaniku to Harusame no Sunomono, chilled pork with noodles. He could
also hear the sound of knives slicing through fish and vegetables; and that
meant to him that a Japanese of importance was staying here,
a
Japanese
who could afford two or three personal cooks. He paused for a
moment, and then padded silently to the end of the corridor, where there
wa
* a door marked with Japanese characters. They were in the
old language, but he read them quickly: A SANCTUARY FORBIDDEN TO NONBELIEVERS.