The Kaisho (48 page)

Delacroix’s tip had been a good one, he suddenly decided. This was a special person. He felt confident with her, balanced in the net of her agile mind, and he felt a brief twinge of envy for whoever had been her husband or lover.

“I think there’s someone in Washington who will know,” Renata said, “but it will be exceedingly dangerous to approach him on the matter.”

They were at the first wing of the wall, gleaming black marble engraved with the names of the fallen. Rain struck the memorial, individual drops sliding down its slick face like tears down a cheek.

Renata stopped, stood staring at the wall for a moment. At her feet, a tiny American flag planted at the memorial’s base fluttered in the wind, and rose petals torn from a bouquet lay scattered on the stone walk.

She swung toward him, very close, so that her exhalations fell upon him in tiny puffs. “Remember I told you that there were people in Washington who supported Bane clandestinely? This man is one of them. He’s high up in Bane’s hierarchy, but like a spook, he publicly espouses another philosophy.”

Her eyes, dark and reflective, seemed hewn out of the same black rock as the memorial behind her.

“He may be vulnerable because he is sometimes indiscreet in his sexual life. I have only very recently come into a few excellent photos. I have been waiting for the most judicious moment to use them against him. So, it seems, our meeting is most fortuitous.”

In the rain-filled night, sheen and halo—the one indirect, the other ephemeral—made her appear many years younger. Gaunt found her both desirable and inspiring, a potent combination. Seeing her in this glitter, he was reminded of a portrait he had once seen of Lucrezia Borgia, Cesare’s sister. Both were illegitimate children, and a popular theory had it that this fact played a dominant role in their subsequent lust for power. Gaunt found himself for a moment swept up in the role he imagined for her.

“This man is connected to the nerve center of Rance Bane’s machine,” Renata continued, “and if you use the information I give you, he will tell you what you need to know.” She used a strong, working-woman’s forefinger, its clear-lacquered nail cut to a man’s length, to wipe her cheek free of rain. “And who knows, perhaps because of this the whole of Bane’s foul machine will begin to unravel.”

A chance to save the company! Gaunt was dizzy with the possibilities. Just a few short hours ago he was contemplating throwing himself in despair into the Potomac, and now look what his one-man investigation had turned up: the probability of a frame and a way to prove it.

“Tell me,” he said a little breathlessly. “What’s the man’s name?”

The rain, striking her face, made it seem as if her pale skin was carved from marble. She said, “William Justice Lillehammer.”

I want to confess everything,” Margarite said. “But to you, not to the federal government.” She looked up into Croaker’s face. “Of all the people in my life, I only trust you.” She put her head against his shoulder. “My God, how pathetic that sounds, even to me. You’re the next thing to a complete stranger. What have I made of my life?”

“You told me when you got married, you knew exactly what you wanted.”

“Oh, I did! Who am I now? I don’t even recognize myself. Everything I’ve ever wanted has been rendered meaningless.”

They were in her Lexus, somewhere in the Connecticut countryside after having dropped Francie off with Margarite’s friend, a divorcée with her own at-home consulting business and an intelligent Scottie named Muirfield. She was a golfing enthusiast and promised to teach Francie the game.

“I want to thank you,” Margarite said. “Your effect on Francie has been extraordinary. I was worried back there that she wouldn’t let you go.”

“She’s a strong girl,” Croaker said. “After all she’s been through she still wants to live.”

“I’m afraid I’ve made quite a mess of both our lives.”

They drove in silence for some time. Because it was what was on his mind, he told her about his friendship with Nicholas. He recounted how they had met when they had both been tracking the man who had turned out to be Nicholas’s cousin, the ninja Saigo, how they had been reunited in Japan when Croaker had lost his hand. As he did so, his words reconstructed the electrifying past for him to live all over again. But it was a mixed blessing; he found that he missed Nicholas with an almost physical sense of pain.

“I envy you that kind of friendship,” Margarite said wistfully. When she saw that they were headed toward Old Westbury, she said, “No, I don’t want to go home. I can’t be there now.”

“But your husband—”

“My husband doesn’t count,” she said carefully. “I see now that he never did.” She ran her hand through her hair, pulling it back from her cheek. She turned on the seat to half-face him. “Lew, I’m going to tell you something that I never imagined I’d tell anyone. But then I could never have imagined this future for myself, and I’m so frightened now that I know I have to do something
tangible
to try and disperse my terror, otherwise I know it’ll consume me.”

“You’re frightened that your brother’s murderer will come back for you?”

“No,” she said with a voice quavery with emotion. “I’m afraid he
won’t
come back for me.”

They waited at a light, hanging in the midst of stalled traffic, the flow cut off until the signal changed and the surge began.

Croaker blew air out of his mouth in order to clear his mind. “I think you’re going to have to explain that.”

Margarite nodded. “That and many other things,” she whispered. “But for now, drive, Lew, drive until you run out of road.”

All the way out to Montauk Point she seemed to sleep, lying slumped beside him, her head tilted back, her hair folded softly around her, her skirt hiked partway up her thighs. She seemed like the girl he had dated his one summer out of Hell’s Kitchen, part of a program for disadvantaged kids he’d lied to get into in order to escape the city’s intolerable August heat. Somewhere in Pennsylvania, outside a small town with an Indian name that seemed funny to a kid his age, he had come upon her in the dusty, flyblown interior of a tiny general store. They had drunk five-cent Cokes from a red-and-white vending machine, and the afternoon had seemed miraculous even then.

Innocence was a precious commodity for a blazing youth like Lew Croaker, who routinely cracked heads and defended himself with a scarred baseball bat on New York’s ferocious West Side. Innocence, for him, had been a dream, a quality too far out of his ken to recognize before he had met Rebecca. And, of course, he didn’t recognize it, not that summer, anyway, not until many more years had passed.

Croaker woke her when they were east of Amagansett, passing through the gorgeous desolation of sand, beach plum, stunted black pine, and the occasional wild rose bush that was Napeague. This was the narrow neck that connected the east end of the Hamptons to Montauk. Another Indian name, he thought.

“We’ll be running out of blacktop soon,” he said as she stirred. “Are you hungry yet?”

“Let’s wait,” she said, staring out the window at the hypnotic rise and fall of the dunes.

He stopped at a ramshackle clam bar on the edge of a ragged field of beach plum to call Lillehammer. He wanted to bring him more or less up to date, but he also wanted to know if Lillehammer had gotten the lab reports back from the crime scene. The assistant who answered the number Lillehammer had given him told him to wait when he gave his operation name. He got the impression that she was beeping Lillehammer, who was God knows where, doing God knows what.

“You were right when you said we’d need a sorcerer,” Lillehammer said when he finally came on the line. “No prints—not even smudges—except those of the two victims.” His voice sounded metallic, as if some electronic gizmo was tearing his voice apart and putting it back together. “If this was a science-fiction novel, we’d clone this sonuvabitch from his own DNA, grow him up in accelerated fashion, and not only find out what he looks like but send him out after the original.”

“Very funny.” After the events of the day Croaker was not in the mood for levity of any kind. “What’s this DNA mapping going to do for us?”

“Forget it. Modern science’s not going to ride to our rescue on this one. But I did get a line on that feather stuck to the girl’s front, and it’s interesting. It’s from a white magpie. Very rare avian, according to the Smithsonian expert I scared up. So rare, I had to go through six ornithologists before I got the ID. Its habitat is the highlands of Southeast Asia. No zoo or rare-bird breeder in this country has one. How is your end progressing?”

Croaker gave him an edited account of the inroads he was making with Margarite.

“This is great news, far more than I expected. Keep at it. She says this guy Robert is oriental; the white magpie’s from Southeast Asia. It fits.” Lillehammer paused for a moment, the hollow sound of the secure line ticking like a bomb. “Ishmael, if the DeCamillo woman’s right and the murderer has some kind of affinity for her, she’s our best friend right now. Hold on tight. And don’t take shit from her husband. If Tony D. gives you trouble, I’ll give you whatever backup you need. He’s no Dominic Goldoni, we know how to take care of gavones like him.”

“I’m going to need an rdv as soon as I’m finished with her. That’ll be tomorrow. Where do you suggest?”

There was a brief silence while Lillehammer considered the options. “Book seats on a commercial airline and I’ll meet the two of you myself at Washington airport. Advise me of the particulars, okay?”

Croaker said it was and broke the connection. He got back in the car, cruised the rest of the way into tacky Montauk village. They ate outside of town, at Gosman’s, once a medium-sized restaurant overlooking the wharves where the fishing boats came in, now a sprawling institution of eateries, shops, and walkways, a community unto itself.

They were seated at a table near one of the oversize plate-glass windows overlooking the harbor. At this time of the year, the vast restaurant was nearly empty, but the sea gulls, grown bold and enormous from being fed by Gosman’s customers, swooped and called raucously across the dark water as if it were the height of summer.

They sat drinking in companionable silence for some time. Despite his eagerness to get closer to finding Dominic Goldoni’s murderer, Croaker held himself in check. It wasn’t easy. Here, sitting opposite him, was the single link anyone had to the man who had murdered Goldoni. He had an intuition, bred of the jungle of New York’s streets, that if she could not or would not help him, the man would never be found, despite his and Lillehammer’s best efforts. He knew she wanted to tell him everything she had been sitting on since she and Francie had been abducted, but these were terrible, tragic events. Who knew whether she had the fortitude—or the depth of trust in him—required to dredge them up again into the light of day? He was not at all sure, if their positions were reversed, whether he would be able to do it.

Margarite drained her drink, sat staring into the empty glass. “After he let us go,” she said in a slow, almost emotionless tone, “after it was all over, his—what he did to Dom… when I brought Francie back…” Her pale eyes swung up to meet his.... “I knew then that it wasn’t over.”

She swallowed, and he could see that she was mentally sinking her toes into the ground, as one physically does at the shoreline to keep from being pulled out on the tide.

“You see, something happened between him and me that... I don’t think he anticipated. He came here to use me, to get to Dom, and in that he succeeded. But there was something else, on the road one night, a kind of—I don’t know how to put it—a transference.

“He allowed me the opportunity to kill him and I took it. It was false; he’d switched razors and the one I used had no sharp edge, but that didn’t matter, he told me, and he was right. I tried to kill him; and I would have, and that was important for me to know. That act… unlocked something inside me, some inner resolve I never knew I had.”

She licked her lips, and Croaker called for another round of drinks. When it came, he said, “You said something about a transference.”

She nodded. “Yes. You see, it was as if he gave me this—strength—and in return took something from me.”

“What was it?”

She took a sip of her drink. “I don’t know. At least, I didn’t. Now I’m beginning to suspect what it might be, and it has me terrified.” She drank again, almost compulsively, and Croaker resolved to order them food as soon as he could catch the waitress’s eye.

Margarite’s head was in her hands. “I’ve got to talk to someone about this. To keep it bottled up anymore is… intolerable. But who would understand? Not my husband or my daughter, and I can’t talk about any of this to my friends.” Her head came up, and her eyes searched his face. For what, he wondered—understanding, absolution? “That leaves you, Lew, because I don’t know what you are to me—or what you will become. You’re as unknown as what my life has become.”

“Margarite, what is it you’re afraid he’s taken from you?”

“My ability to hate him.”

He saw that she was terrified he would laugh in her face as, almost surely, her husband would have done had she confessed this to him. After what he had seen of Dominic Goldoni’s body, this particular fear did not seem at all funny to him. On the contrary, it seemed chilling.

“It’s as if we’re bound together at the soul. I can’t get him out of my mind—I don’t mean his face or… But in the dead of night I can
smell
him,
feel
him close to me as if he’s actually beside me.”

Croaker caught her eyes with his. “Margarite, I want you to understand something before we go any further. This man who abducted you and Francie, who murdered your brother, is so extremely dangerous that I think quite literally you’re the only one who can help me track him down. Without you I’m nowhere. I’ve got to know I can count on you in this. If you’re this conflicted about—”

“I want to help you,” she said a bit too quickly. “I
need
to, to prove to myself that he hasn’t...” She shook her head, unable to go on.