Tengu (29 page)

She raised one
eyebrow.
A perfect arch, finely drawn.

“I was down at
police headquarters,” he said. “They told me there.”

“Are you a
police officer?”

He shook his
head.

There was a
lengthy silence. Nancy at last said, “You’ve come about your son, I suppose?”

“You know where
he is? Is he safe?”

Nancy reached
out and gently held the sleeve of his jacket. “He’s safe for the time being.
Come in. There’s nobody here at the moment.”

Jerry felt as
if his head were exploding with questions and anxiety, but he knew Japanese
etiquette well enough to hold his tongue, and to follow Nancy into her silent,
austere apartment.

“Sit down,”
said Nancy, indicating a cushion. Jerry eased himself into the cross-legged
position which he had once accepted as the only way to sit, but which now required
some painful tugging at his shins.

“You’re certain
he’s safe?” he asked.

“Certain,” said
Nancy. “They have taken him for the express purpose of flushing you out of your
home, to entice you to a place where they can easily dispose of you. They will
take great care of him until you are dead.”

“
Who’s
theyT’ demanded Jerry.

Nancy went
across to the liquor cabinet, slid it open, and took out a bottle of Gekkeikan
export sake. She poured it carefully into a flask and left it to warm. She
said, “I do not know their identity any more than you do. But they are hawks.”

“It was you who
left that scroll under my windshield?”

“It was a
friend who put it there. But the message came from me.”

“I should have
understood it,” said Jerry, with bitter realization. ‘The hawks will return to
their roost.’
To catch the lamb, of course.
It’s from
something by Tanizaki Jun’ichiro.
Chijin no At?”

Nancy said,
“You impress me.”

“A Westerner
shouldn’t be conversant with sadistic Japanese literature of the 1920’s? Why
did you leave me the message if you didn’t think that I’d understand it?”

“I hoped you
would grasp it intuitively.”

Jerry tugged
again at his awkwardly folded leg. “As it turned out, I was in too much of a hurry.

The police
wanted me to look at a suspect they’ve charged with murdering Sherry Cantor and
that police officer out on the Hollywood Freeway.”

Nancy poured
out a little sak6 and handed it to Jerry in a fragile porcelain cup. She took
some herself, and then sat down close to him. “You are an unusual man,” she
said. “I sense that there is something hanging over your head.”

“A mushroom
cloud,” he told her wryly, and raised his glass. “Kampail”

“Kampail” she
echoed.

They drank, and
sat in silence for a while. Then Jerry said, “These people who have taken
David–they’re the same people who sent that man to murder me?”

Nancy said,
“You understand, then, that Sherry Cantor’s murder was a mistake?”

“I understood
the minute the police described the assailant as wearing a white No mask. And–I
had a feeling, I guess–something to do with the fact that I’ve been undergoing
psychiatric treatment for years after what happened to me in Japan–and, I don’t
know. I just guessed.”

Nancy reached
forward and picked up the sake flask again. Her black robe opened a little, and
Jerry was conscious in a way that made him feel curiously old, but also
curiously aroused, that he had glimpsed the dark areola of her nipple.
Underneath that thin silk robe, she must be naked.

How can I be so
anxious about David, he thought of himself, and still think something like
that?

But then she
passed
him ?
l fresh cup of sake and he remembered that
he was sitting with a Japanese woman. His mind, after all these years, had
slipped back into the timeless traditional way of observing every ritual
scrupulously, whatever its importance. There was a time for everything, for
anxiety, for passion, for pursuit, and revenge. There was also time for sake,
and quiet intensive conversation, and the studied but accidental glimpse of a
beautiful woman’s breast. It was quite possible she had allowed the accident to
happen, to reassure him.

“Are you one of
them?” Jerry asked her.

Nancy stared at
him for a moment, as if she were unsure. Then she said, “No, it is impossible
to be ‘one of them.’ They are not a gang, in the conventional sense of
the word, nor
a sect. I am unsure what they arc; but I do
now realize that they are evil and powerful. I am employed by one of their
hired running dogs as a translator, organizer,
general
drag lady.”

She sipped at
her drink, and then said, “A few days ago I became curious about them: why they
wanted to kill you, who they really are. I sent my houseboy Kemo to follow one
of them after a meeting. If you saw my address at the police headquarters, then
you will know what happened to him.”

“I only
glimpsed the report,” said Jerry, with a dry mouth. “It seems they tore his
heart out.”

“It is a
technique used in a particular martial art known as Oni, the art of the
demons,” Nancy explained, almost as if she were talking to a party of tourists.
Then she looked up at Jerry, and her eyes were hard and dark and unforgiving.
“The adept’s arm is swung around to gain velocity, in the same way that a
baseball pitcher winds up. By the time it reaches his intended victim, his hand
is formed in the shape of a chisel, fingers straight, and it is traveling as
fast as a bullet train. The technique is to drive the hand right through the
muscular wall of the stomach, upward and slightly to the right, and to seize
the victim’s heart.” Jerry said quietly, “I’ve heard of Oni. But it’s
forbidden, isn’t it? I mean, it’s actually illegal.”

“Illegality,
danger, death, they are all part of what makes the Japanese personality what it
is,” said Nancy. “You are speaking of the people who invented seppuku and
kamikaze and the rituals of Shrine Shinto. You are speaking of people who eat
fugu fish not because it tastes better than any other, but because it can kill
within minutes. Can you imagine sitting down to a dinner, not knowing if you
will ever arise from it alive?”

“Is there any
particular reason why I should believe you?” asked Jerry. “Can you give me any
guarantee that David is unhurt and still alive?”

Nancy Shiranuka
watched him for a while, and then said, “No. But if you have only half an
understanding of what is happening here, you will know that I am risking my
life telling you any of this. If I fail, the next Tengu they send out will be
for me.”

Jerry lifted
one finger, his mouth half open, in sudden and complete understanding. “The
Tengu,” he whispered. “So I was right.”

“You guessed it
was the Tengu? That was what they were afraid of. That was why they sent him to
kill you. •There can be only two or three people in the United States who know
what a Tengu is, what a Tengu can do. They wanted to launch their program
without anybody knowing what they were doing.”

“What program?”
Jerry asked her. “What are you talking about?”

“They are
creating a corps of killer bodyguards,” Nancy told him. “A band of fanatical
and superbly fit Japanese who will do whatever they’re told to protect their
masters. Well, that is what they claim they are doing.
Whether
they are speaking the truth or not, I don’t know.
That’s all they ever
tell us. But they may have underestimated what I knew about the Tengu from the
days in which I was a disciple of the Seven Black Kami. And they may have
underestimated my intuition.”

“Your cold
wind?” asked Jerry gently.

“My cold wind,”
nodded Nancy. “The cold wind which tells me that if they are creating Tengus,
they have more in mind than a mildly profitable scheme to sell killer
bodyguards to rich Arabs and Arizona mafiosi. If they are creating Tengus, they
have only one thing in mind. And that is, apocalypse.”

Jerry thought
for a long while. Then he said, “Where is my son?”

‘‘They have a
ranch out at Pacoima, in the San Gabriel Mountains near San Fernando Airport.

That is where
they have been keeping the Tengus. I expect they took your son there as well.”

Jerry said,
“You’re not tricking me, are you? This isn’t part of a setup, just to get me
out to some place where they can kill me quietly and get it over with? Or is it
naive to ask?”

She said
softly, in her Japanese accent, “I have been through varying degrees of hell in
my life, Mr. Sennett. I have committed crimes of greed and crimes of passion
and the greatest crime of not taking care of my soul or my body. I can be many
things to many different men. I can experience pleasure, and call it pain. I
can experience pain, and call it pleasure. I was blackmailed into helping these
people. They threatened to turn over to the FBI a file of photographs and
documents which would have implicated me in child pornography, abduction,
pimping, illegal sexual activities, and manslaughter. At the same time, they
offered me a very great deal of money. They told me they required absolute
secrecy and absolute devotion. I was to translate technical data for them;
arrange house leases and car rentals and hotel facilities; and act as hostess
and translator for their employees and guests.”

“And they told
you they were creating this special team of bodyguards?” -”That’s correct. They
said that one of their doctors had discovered a new technique during the Tokyo
Olympics for making men stronger and more tolerant to pain. They called the men
Tengus–which at first I thought was simply a nickname like calling a baseball
team the Red Devils. It was only after they killed that girl, Sherry Cantor,
that I began to doubt them. Now, I am quite sure that they have been misleading
me.”

Jerry asked,
“Have you told anybody what you think?” His voice was dull and expressionless.

Nancy said,
“One of them, a man called Gerard Crowley. He is the go-between, the man who
arranges for all the Japanese to come into the United States without being
stopped by immigration officers; the man who takes care of the finance.”

“What did he
say?”

“He didn’t know
whether to believe me or not. They told him nothing more than they told me.

But, he may be
sympathetic. I’m not sure. He is a very cold person, very difficult to reach.’’

Jerry held out
his cup for more sake. He wasn’t at all drunk. It usually took more than half a
bottle to get him anything near tipsy. He felt highly suspicious of Nancy
Shiranuka, and yet he couldn’t really sec any reason why he should. She had
tried to warn him, after all, as subtly as she knew how, and if he hadn’t
understood her message about the hawks, then it had been his own fault. She
certainly hadn’t advertised her address, so she couldn’t have been prepared for
him to come around. The Japanese were always so meticulous: even their
accidents didn’t happen by accident. But Jerry couldn’t believe that he had
been afforded a glimpse of Nancy’s address by design.

He said, “You
know why they wanted to kill me, don’t you?”

Nancy replied.
“It was something to do with the war.
Something to do with
the fact that, if any of the Tengus had been mentioned in the press or on
television, you would have known at once what they were.
It was a
question of security, they told me.”

“Well, you’re
partly right,” said Jerry. “In fact, they needn’t have worried. A Tengu
attacked Sherry Cantor next door, quite horribly and spectacularly, and even
when I heard what had happened to her, I didn’t put two and two together, not
at first. It was all too long ago, too far away. The thing still haunts me,
still gives me nightmares, but who would have imagined that it would return for
real? Not me. I would have been the last one to think of a Tengu, no matter how
grotesquely anyone was butchered. It was only the No mask that reminded me.
The face of the greatest Oat of all, the demon of a hundred
identities and a million cruel ways.’’

Nancy said,
“You know about the Tengu, don’t you?”

Jerry nodded.

“Tell me
everything,” she said. “I promise we will do whatever we can to find your son.
But tell me everything. It could help me to understand what is happening, and
who is creating these monsters, and why.”

Jerry stood up,
and walked across to the window. “I’m not supposed to tell you this,” he said.

He felt very tired
and empty, and somehow his disloyalty to his country’s secrets tasted like
ashes, as if all the confidential dispatches which had comprised the Appomattox
Papers had been burned, as a punishment, on his tongue. “But, during the latter
part of the Pacific war, when I was a lieutenant in the Naval Intelligence
Command, bright, intelligent, just out of college, I was told that I had
volunteered to be parachuted at night into Japan, into the Chugoku Sanchi, not
far from Hiroshima, to monitor at close quarters the military radio messages
that were being sent to and from Hiroshima to Tokyo.”

Nancy said
nothing, but lit a cigarette.

Jerry said, “I
was the ideal candidate for the job, they told me. I was young and fit. I spoke
fluent Japanese. I had worked for nearly two years on Japanese naval codes, and
I could put on a headset and understand what the commander of the Akagi was
saying to the commander of the Soryu without even bothering to jot it all
down.’’ He paused for a moment or two, and then he said, “They called the
mission ‘Appomattox.’ They warned me that the chances of my returning to the
United States alive were not particularly high; but that what I was going to do
was going to be crucial to the entire course of the war.
In
fact, more than that, to the entire course of twentieth-century history.

“They said
that, all across the Pacific theater, U.S. Marines had been suddenly met by
fierce opposition from special Japanese troops they had codenamed ‘Hogs.’ The
exact casualty ratio was top secret, they told me, and as far as I’m aware, it
still is today. But to give you some idea, five amphibious landings on small
Pacific islands yielded a U.S. casualty list of more than twenty-three thousand
men dead, and eighteen million dollars of equipment lost, and these were on
nothing more than atolls and reefs of minor strategic importance. The island of
Pulau Thuap only fell to the Marines after three separate attempts at storming
its beaches, and seventeen saturation-bombing missions by B-25’s.”