The Key to Midnight (11 page)

The gaunt man was not yet in sight.

Alex dropped his topcoat in the center of the puddle of light. He hurried back the way he had come, but only ten or fifteen feet, until he was out of the reach of the street lamp and in the embrace of darkness once more.

He was still alone.

He quickly slipped behind a row of five enormous trash barrels and hunkered down. From the space between the barrels and the back wall of the house, he had an unobstructed view of the intersection where the gaunt man would soon appear.

Footsteps. Sound carried well in the cold air.

Alex strove to quiet his own ragged breathing.

The stranger entered the far end of the serviceway and stopped abruptly, surprised by the disappearance of his prey.

In spite of the apprehension that had pulled him as taut as a drumhead, Alex smiled.

The stranger stood without moving, without making a sound.

Come on, you bastard.

Finally the man approached along the serviceway. Warier than he had been a minute ago, he moved as lightly as a cat, making no noise to betray himself.

Alex cupped one hand over his mouth, directing the crystallized plumes of his breath toward the ground, hoping they would dissipate before they could rise like ghosts in the darkness and possibly betray his position.

As the stranger approached, he cautiously checked behind the trash cans on both sides of the alley. He moved in a half crouch. His right hand was jammed in his coat pocket.

Holding a gun?

The gaunt man walked out of the first circle of light and into darkness, visible only as a silhouette.

Although the night was cold and Alex was without a coat, he began to perspire.

The stranger reached the midpoint light. Methodically he continued to inspect every object and shadow behind which—or in which—a man might hide.

Beside Alex, the garbage cans exuded the nauseating odor of spoiled fish and rancid cooking oil. He’d been aware of the stench from the moment he’d hidden behind the barrels, and second by second, it grew riper, more disgusting. He imagined that he could taste as well as smell the fish. He resisted the urge to gag, to clear his throat, and to spit out the offending substance.

The gaunt man was almost out of the light at the halfway point, about to step into the second stretch of darkness, when again he stopped and stood as if quick-frozen.

He had seen the topcoat. Perhaps he was thinking that the coat had slipped off Alex’s shoulder and that, in a panic, Alex had not stopped to retrieve it.

The stranger moved again—not slowly, as before, and not with caution either. He strode purposefully toward the third streetlight and the discarded topcoat. The hard echoes of his footsteps bounced back and forth between the houses that bracketed him, and he didn’t look closely at any more of the trash barrels.

Alex held his breath.

The stranger was twenty feet away.

Ten feet.

Five.

As soon as the guy passed by, literally close enough to touch, Alex rose in the shadows.

The stranger’s attention was fixed on the coat.

Alex slipped soundlessly into the passageway behind his adversary. What little noise he made was masked by the other man’s footsteps.

The stranger stopped in the circle of light, bent down, and picked up the topcoat.

Because it fell behind, Alex’s shadow did not betray him as he moved into the light, but the stranger sensed the danger. He gasped and began to turn.

Alex swung the Awamori with all his strength. The bottle exploded against the side of the stranger’s head, and a rain of glass rang down on the brick pavement. The night was filled with the aroma of sweet-potato brandy.

The stranger staggered, dropped the coat, put one hand to his head, reached feebly for Alex with the other hand, and then fell as if his flesh had been transformed into lead by some perverse alchemy.

Glancing left and right along the alleyway, Alex expected people to come out of the houses to see what was happening. The pop of the bottle as it broke and the clink of glass had seemed loud. He stood with the neck of the bottle still clamped in his right hand, ready to flee at the first sign of response, but after half a minute he realized that he hadn’t been heard.

The flurries of snow had grown into a squall. Dense sheets of fat white flakes swirled through the passageway.

The gaunt man was unconscious but not seriously hurt. His heart was beating strongly, and his breathing was shallow but steady. The ugly red precursor of a bruise marked the spot where the bottle had shattered against his temple, but the superficial cuts in his face had already begun to clot.

Alex searched the stranger’s pockets. He found coins, a wad of paper money, a book of matches that bore no advertising, a packet of facial tissues, breath mints, and a comb. He didn’t find a wallet, credit cards, a driver’s license, or any other identification, and the absence of ID told him almost as much as he could hope to learn: He was dealing with a cautious professional.

The guy was carrying a gun: a Japanese-made 9mm automatic with a sound suppressor. It was in his right overcoat pocket, which was much deeper than the left pocket. Evidently he carried the pistol so routinely that he had modified his wardrobe to accommodate it. He also had a spare magazine of ammunition.

Alex propped him against a wall on one side of the alleyway. The gunman sat where he was placed, hands at his sides, palms turned up. His chin rested on his chest.

After retrieving his soiled topcoat, Alex slipped it on, not just cape style this time. The knife wounds flared with pain as he eased his bandaged left arm into the coat sleeve.

By now a thin, icy lace of snow covered the unconscious man’s hair. In his battered condition, with the snowflake mantilla, he looked like a pathetic yet determinedly jaunty drunk who was trying to get laughs by wearing a doily on his head.

Alex stooped beside him and slapped his face a couple of times to bring him around.

The gunman stirred, opened his eyes, and blinked stupidly. Comprehension came gradually to him.

Alex pointed the pistol at the guy’s heart. When he was sure that his captive was no longer disoriented, he said, “I have a few questions.”

“Go to hell,” the guy said in Japanese.

Alex spoke in the same language. “Why were you following me?”

“I wasn’t.”

“You think I’m a fool?”

“Yes.”

Alex poked him hard in the stomach with the gun, then again.

Wincing, the stranger said, “I was going to rob you.”

“No. Nothing that simple. Someone ordered you to watch me.”

The man said nothing.

“Who’s your boss?” Alex asked.

“I’m my own boss.”

“Don’t lie.” Alex poked him hard with the gun once more.

The stranger gasped in pain, glared at him, but didn’t respond.

Although Alex was incapable of using physical abuse to extract information, he was willing to engage in light psychological torture. He put the cold muzzle of the weapon against the man’s left eye.

With his right eye, the stranger stared back unwaveringly. He didn’t appear to be intimidated.

“Who’s your boss?” Alex asked.

No response.

“One round, through the brain.”

The stranger remained silent.

“I’ll do it,” Alex said quietly.

“You’re not a killer.”

“Is that what they told you?” Alex pressed the muzzle against the guy’s left eye just hard enough to hurt him.

The wind fluted through the clusters of trash barrels, playing them as though they were organ pipes, producing a crude, hollow, ululant, unearthly music.

Finally Alex sighed and rose to his feet. Staring down at the stranger, still training the gun on him, he said, “Tell your bosses I’ll get to the truth one way or another. If they want to save me time, if they want to cooperate, maybe I’ll keep my mouth shut when I know what this is all about.”

The gaunt man virtually spat out his response: “You’re dead.”

“We’re all dead sooner or later.”

“In your case, sooner.”

“I’m not going to drop this case. I’m going to be a bulldog. Tell them that,” Alex said. “You people don’t scare me.”

“We haven’t tried yet.”

Still holding the pistol, Alex backed off. When he and the stranger were separated by twenty yards of pavement, he turned and walked away.

At the end of the alley, when Alex glanced back, the gaunt man had vanished into the gloom and the snow.

Alex rounded the corner and walked swiftly through the Gion maze toward more major thoroughfares.

The blackness above the city seemed to be something other than an ordinary night sky, something worse, an astronomical oddity that bled all the heat from the world below, that sucked away the light as well, until even the dazzling spectacle of the Gion dimmed to a somber glow, until every bright-yellow bulb began to radiate a thin and sour aura, until red neon darkened to the muddy maroon of cold, coagulating blood.

The late-autumn chill pierced him and scraped like a steel scalpel along his bones.

It was not a night for sleeping alone, but the bed that awaited him would be empty, the sheets as crisp and cool as morgue shrouds.

In the lightless room, in bed, staring at the shadowy ceiling, Joanna startled herself by saying aloud: “Alex.” That involuntary word seemed to have been spoken by someone else, and it sounded like a soft cry for help.

The name reverberated in her mind while she contem- plated all the meanings that it had for her.

Misery was her only companion. She was being forced yet again to choose between a man and her obsessive need for an extraordinary degree of privacy. This time, however, either choice would destroy her. She was teetering on the brink of mental collapse.

Her joy in life—and therefore her strength—had been drained by years of compulsive solitude.

Nevertheless, if she dared to pursue Alex, the world would close like a vise around her, as it had done more than once before. In a waking nightmare, the ceiling, the walls, and the floor would appear to draw together from all sides, tighter, tighter, until she was reduced by claustrophobia to unreasoning animal panic. Huddled. Shaking. Unable to breathe. Gripped by an unshakable sense of doom.

On the other hand, if she didn’t pursue him, she would finally have to accept that she would always be alone. Forever. He was her last chance. Resigning herself to unending loneliness was a heavier weight than she could carry.

Either way, whether she reached out to Alex or shunned him, she would be unable to endure the consequences. She was so tired of the struggle of living.

She longed for sleep. Her head ached. Her eyes burned. She felt as though innumerable lead weights encumbered her limbs. In sleep she would be briefly free.

She raised herself from the sheets and sat on the edge of the bed. Without switching on the lamp, she opened the nightstand drawer and located the small bottle of the prescription drug on which she depended more nights than not. Although she’d taken one sedative an hour ago, she wasn’t even drowsy. One more couldn’t do any harm.

But then she thought, Why just one more? Why not five, ten, an entire bottleful?

Her exhaustion, her fear, and her depression at the prospect of perpetual loneliness were so grave that she didn’t reject the idea immediately, as she would have done only a day ago.

In the darkness, like a penitent reverently fingering rosary beads, Joanna counted pills.

Twenty.

That was surely enough for a long sleep.

No. She must not call it sleep. No euphemisms. She would hold on to at least some self-respect. She must be honest with herself, if nothing else. Call it by its true name. Suicide.

She wasn’t frightened, repelled, or embarrassed by the word, and she realized that her weary acceptance represented a terrible loss of will. For as long as she could remember, she had been tough enough to face anything, but she had no resources left. She was so tired.

Twenty pills.

No more loneliness. No longer would she have to yearn for intimacy that she could never allow herself to accept. No more alienation. No more doubts. No more pain. No more nightmares, visions of syringes, and grasping mechanical hands. No more.

She no longer had to choose between Alex Hunter and her sick compulsion to smash love when and where it arose. Now the choice was much simpler yet far more profound. For the moment she had to decide only whether to take one more pill—or all twenty.

She held them in her cupped hands.

They were as smooth and cool as tiny pebbles fished from a mountain stream.

Alex was accustomed to sleeping as little as possible. If time was money, then every minute spent in sleep was an act of financial irresponsibility. This night, however, he was not going to get even the few hours of rest that he usually required. His mind raced, and he couldn’t downshift it.

Finally he got a bottle of beer from the refrigerator in the suite’s wet bar and sat in an armchair in the drawing room. The only light was that which came through the windows—the pale, ghostly radiance of predawn Kyoto.

He was not worried about the people who had sent the dorobo to his hotel room and had him followed in the Gion. The single cause of his insomnia was Joanna. A torrent of images cascaded through his mind: Joanna in the pantsuit that she’d worn to lunch at Mizutani; Joanna on the stage of the Moonglow Lounge, moving sinuously in a clinging, red silk dress; Joanna laughing; Joanna so vibrant and alive in the Kyoto sun; Joanna frightened and huddled in the shade of the trees in the garden at Nijo Castle.

He was filled with an almost painful desire, but more surprising was the tenderness that he felt toward her, something deeper than affection, deeper even than friendship.