Tengu (3 page)

“Sure,” said
Gerard, with pretended ease. “Would you like some coffee, Evie?”

Eva shook her
head. “I don’t think so, thank you.”

There was a
moment of tension. Gerard rubbed his hand across his mouth, as if he was
unconsciously making sure that there were no traces of strange kisses. “Well,”
he said, “I kind of guessed that you wouldn’t.”

Francesca was
still standing by the door, and Gerard glanced across at her and closed his
eyes briefly in a catlike expression which meant. You go make coffee, I’ll
handle this. Francesca paused, then left, leaving the office door fractionally
ajar.

“Sit down, why
don’t you?” Gerard asked Eva, indicating a white revolving armchair.

Eva said: “No,
thank you. I don’t think it’s going to take me long to ask you where you’ve
been these past three nights.’’

He was walking
back around his desk. He looked up at her, his dark head outlined against a
bright golden painting of drying tobacco leaves.
“Where I’ve
been?” he asked her.
“You know damn well where I’ve been.”

“You’ve been
working three days and three nights without sleep?”

“Almost.
I had paperwork up to here.” He raised his hand up
to the level of his eyes.

“The Turkish consignment?”

He narrowed his
eyes.
“Mostly.”

“So David
Orlando’s lying?”

“David Orlando?
David’s in Dallas.”

Eva lowered her
eyes. “I know he is,” she said softly. “I called him there yesterday. He told
me he handled the Turkish consignment all by himself, and finished up two days
ago. He also told me you had almost no work in the office this week, and that
you wouldn’t be pushed until early next month.”

Gerard stared
at her for almost half a minute, without speaking. Then he opened his silver
cigar box, hesitated, and finally chose a small Havana. He reached for his
cutters, snipped the end off the cigar, and placed it with exaggerated
precision between his lips. Eva found his silence, his meticulous actions,
distinctly unnerving. His eyes seemed less penetrable than ever.

If only she
didn’t want him so much, and need to know that he still loved her. If only she
was weak enough to stay at home and be satisfied with what she had.

Outside, a fire
siren warbled and whooped along the Avenue of the Stars. Gerard waited until the
echoes had died away, and then he said: “You were that suspicious, huh?
Suspicious enough to call up David?”

“What would you
have done, Gerard, if I’d stayed away for three nights?”

He opened a box
of kitchen matches. “You forget that you don’t have any reason for staying away
nights. I do.”

She tried to
smile, but her mouth couldn’t manage it. “That’s obvious enough,” she said.
“But the reason isn’t work, is it? It’s her.”

“Her?”

Eva nodded
toward the half-open office door. “She’s the one, isn’t she? Francesca?”

Gerard let out
an abrupt, uncertain laugh that was almost a cough. “Evie...” he said, “I don’t
really think you’re being very fair to me here...”

“You don’t
think I’m fair?” Eva interrupted, in an intense whisper. “What the hell do you
call fair?”

“I mean
understanding,” protested Gerard. “I mean you don’t seem like you’re trying to
understand what’s going down here.”

“What’s to
understand? You’re going to bed with your receptionist!’’

“Evie,” Gerard
said, raising his hand, as if he were fending off a flapping bird. “Evie, every
human situation has its two sides. You don’t seem to understand that.”

Eva turned
away. “You’re just the same, aren’t you?” she said.
“Always
trying to make me feel guilty for the things that you’ve done.
Well, it
won’t work this time, Gerard, because I do understand. I understand that you’ve
been leaving me at home to run your house and look after your daughters while
you go off fornicating with your twenty-five-year-old receptionist.’’

Gerard let out
a breath.

“Can you understand
that I still love you?” he asked her. “Can you understand that what I feel for
Francesca hasn’t made the slightest difference to my appreciation of what you
are?”

She turned back
toward him. She was frowning. “Are you serious?” she asked.

“Never more serious in my whole life.”

“My God,” she
said. “I don’t believe you sometimes. You treat love and appreciation as if
they were brands of tobacco.”

He struck a
match. It flared up, and there was a sharp smell of burned phosphorus. He kept
his eyes on her while he lit his cigar. Then he waved the match to extinguish
it, and puffed smoke.

Eva hated the
smell of cigars.

“I love you,
Evie. That’s all I can say. If you don’t believe me, then I’m really sorry. But
it’s true.”

“Do you love
Francesca, too?”

He nodded.
“Yes.
In a different sort of way.”

“What different
sort of way? You mean, more sexually? Is she better in bed than me? She’s
younger, I suppose? Her breasts are more–I mean, her breasts are firmer? And
does she do things I won’t do?”

Gerard continued
to puff at his cigar. “She’s different, that’s all. She’s a different person.”

“I see.
Different.
That tells me precisely zilch.”

Gerard held out
his hand toward her. She didn’t take it. She wished she could. Her anger had
almost burned itself out now, and a numb depression was gradually filling her
up, as if she were lowering herself into an unpleasantly tepid tub of water.
She could feel the tears on her eyelashes, and she knew that if Gerard gave her
any sympathy now, any warmth, she was going to be lost.

“Evie,” Gerard
told her, in a gentle voice, “I’m the kind of man who can never stay still.
It’s in my nature. You’ve known that from the start. That was one of the
reasons you married me. You knew I wanted to go places, make money,
widen
my horizons.”

“I didn’t think
your horizons included other women,” said Eva sharply.

“It was
inevitable. It’s not a disaster. It won’t do anything to break us up. I needed
a different kind of relationship with a different kind of woman, and I found it
with Francesca. That’s all.

There’s no
reason why we should have to make a big production out of it. It’s happening
all the time.”

Eva opened her
pocketbook and took out a crumpled piece of tissue. She dabbed at her eyes, and
said, “You needn’t think I’m crying. I’m angry, that’s all.”

“You don’t have
to be angry.”

“I don’t have
toJbe angry? I’ve found out my husband’s unfaithful and all I have to do is
congratulate him?”

“You can
accept, can’t you? Take it for what it is?”

Eva looked at
him, and slowly nodded. “I can accept, Gerard, but I can’t forgive.”

“What does that
mean? You want a divorce?”

“I don’t know.
Yes. I mean, no, I don’t.”

He came nearer
and held her arms. He gave her a wry, comforting smile, almost sad, and she
could hardly believe that he was the same Gerard she’d married, the same
earnest, ambitious, courteous young man who had given up his seat on a
crosstown bus on a wet day in New York, and then sheltered her under his
umbrella all the way back to her apartment door. The same young man who had
taken her out to Mexican restaurants, and told her over the enchiladas, by the
swiveling light of a tabletop candle, that he was going to be rich and famous,
and that he wanted her to marry him and come to live in L.A., so that she could
share his wealth and his fame, and his love too.

Here he
was–rich, well known in his own business, but distant now, a remote and
incomprehensible man who seemed to have sold himself somewhere along the line
of their married life to some other idea of what life should really be. He looked
the same, and she still adored him the same, but his attention appeared to be
focused someplace else.

She saw herself
in the amber-tinted mirror on the other side of the office. She looked pale and
odd, but far less distraught than she’d imagined. In fact, she was surprised at
her calmness.

Gerard’s back,
dark and tall, looked like the back of a complete stranger.

“Well,” said
Gerard. “What are you going to do?
If you’re not going to
divorce me –what?”

Eva bit her
lip.

“You’re trying
to tell me you won’t...”

Francesca came
to the door. She wasn’t carrying any coffee. Gerard held Eva’s arms tightly,
and warmly, but he said in his softest voice, “No. I won’t give up Francesca.”

A
few minutes after ten o’clock that morning, the telephone started
ringing in a shady, secluded apartment on the fourth floor of a yellow house on
Alta Loma Road, off Sunset Boulevard. It rang and rang for almost five minutes
before a sliding door opened somewhere in the
apartment,
and silk-slippered feet came padding along the polished wood floor of the
corridor.

Nancy Shiranuka
picked up the telephone with long red-lacquered fingernails. She said, “Moshi
moshi,” in a flat, expressionless voice. Then she said, “Oh, it’s you.”

She stood
silent, listening. She was a small, delicately boned girl, even for
a Japanese
. Her face had that startling wide-eyed Hokkaido
prettiness that Japanese men find devastating, and even Americans consider
magnetic, especially if they’ve served out East. It was an acquired taste,
Nancy’s prettiness, like chazuke, rice and tuna fish with green tea poured over
them. She wore nothing but a loose silk robe of glistening black, open at the
front. Her long black hair hung tangled and damp over her shoulders.

All around her,
the apartment was lined with polished oak paneling, and split-bamboo blinds
where drawn over the windows. There were two or three black and-white silk
cushions on the floor, and a low table of carved black wood, but apart from
these the room was bare. On the walls were three erotic woodblocks by Settei
from the Qnna-shimekawa osbie-fumi, the book of sexual instruction for women.
The sun shone across the room in narrow stripes.

Nancy asked,
“Are you sure this is true? Did Torii tell you? And what happened afterward?”

She paused, listening,
and then said, “I see.”

While she was
listening, the sliding door opened again, and there was the sound of bare feet
along the corridor. A very tall American came into the living room, his midriff
wrapped in a towel, and he stood quite close to her, watching her with hooded
eyes. He was gray-haired, at least sixty-five, and his body was gnarled and
muscular and scarred. His face was composed entirely of angles, like Abraham
Lincoln’s image on the side of Mount Rushmorc, and even before you knew who he
was you would have guessed he was a military man.

His name was
Ernest Perry Ouvarov, ex-U.S. Naval Commander. He had distinguished himself at
Midway and Okinawa, and after the signing of the Japanese surrender on the deck
of USS Missouri, he had been largely responsible for the brilliant
reorganization of the American naval administration in the Pacific. Truman had
once called him “the knight of the high seas.”

Beneath the
glittering armor, however, the knight had some fatal weaknesses. In 1951, at
the peak of his influence within the Navy, a newspaper investigation had
implicated him in a bottomless scandal involving opium, surplus war materials,
and worst of all, the procuring of young Japanese girls, some of them no more
than seven years old, for the pleasure of
himself
and
other key naval personnel and politicians.

The corruption
had been so deep-laid that Ouvarov had been permitted to resign his command
without any formal proceedings against him. As one Pentagon official was heard
to remark, “If they court-martial Ouvarov, they’ll have to court-martial the
whole damned Navy.”

Ernest Ouvarov
had changed his name, and worked for years in San Francisco for a transshipment
company. Most people in San Francisco still called him “Fred Milward,” and
thought of him as nothing more than the moderately prosperous vice president of
Bay Shipping, Inc. Two months ago, though, a young Japanese lady called Nancy
Shiranuka had called at his office, and his life had never been the same.

He watched
Nancy for a minute or two, and then crossed the bare room to the black table.
He opened a lacquered box and took out a cigarette. He came back toward her,
tapping the cigarette on his thumbnail.

Nancy said,
“Okay, if that’s the best you can do. Call me again when you have more news.
Yes, I’m sorry, too. Yes. But tell them to keep a real low profile. That’s
right.”

Ernest left the
room and went into the kitchen in search of a light. He came back again,
smoking with affected indifference. Nancy said, “Call me later,” and put down
the phone.

“Well,” asked
Ernest, “what was all that about?”

“I’m not sure
yet.”

“You’re not
sure? That was Yoshikazu, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” she
said. “But he thinks something’s gone wrong. The police are everywhere, and he
can’t get close enough to find out.”

“Wrong?”
queried Ernest, wrinkling his nose, just the way he used to on the bridge of
the USS

Ferndale. “What
the hell could have gone wrong?”

“I don’t know.
But Yoshikazu’s worried.”
Ernest sucked fiercely at his
cigarette, and then blew out smoke. “The whole operation was perfectly planned.
I can’t believe that anything’s gone wrong. Even Yoshkazu isn’t that dumb.”

Nancy
absentmindedly tied the cord of her silk robe. The sun shone on her hair.
“Perfect planning doesn’t always mean perfect execution. You should know that.
Even when you’re dealing with ordinary people, things can go wrong.’’