The Key to Midnight (19 page)

“The man with the mechanical hand?” he asked as he sat on the edge of her bed.

“Yeah.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“I already have. It’s always the same.”

Her face was pale. Her mouth was soft and slack from sleep, and her golden hair was damp with perspiration, yet she was a vision in yellow silk pajamas.

She leaned against him, wanting to be held—and they were kissing before he realized the depth of comfort that both of them needed. He slid his hands down her silk- sheathed back, up along her sides, to her breasts, and she whispered “yes,” between kisses. He was overcome not merely by desire but by a great tenderness unlike anything he had ever felt before, by something that for a moment he couldn’t name. But then he
did
have a name for it—love. He wanted her, needed her, but he also loved her, and in that moment he half believed in love even though he still struggled to resist its pull. The very thought of that freighted word brought to mind his parents’ faces, their voices, their protestations of affection always followed swiftly by anger, shouts, curses, blows, pain. He must have become tense, because the quality of their kiss changed. Joanna felt it too, and when she pulled away, Alex didn’t try to hold her.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I’m confused.”

“Don’t you want me?”

“More than anything.”

“Then what’re you confused about?”

“About what we can have together. Beyond tonight.”

She touched his face. “Let the future take care of itself.”

“I can’t. I’ve got to know what you expect... what you think we can have together.”

“Everything. If we want it.”

“I don’t want to disappoint you, Joanna.”

“You won’t.”

“You don’t know me. In some ways, commitment hasn’t been any easier for me than it’s been for you. I’m ... an emotional cripple.” He was amazed that he had admitted it even to himself, let alone to her. “A part of me is ... missing.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you that I can see,” she said.

“I’ve never said, ‘I love you.’ ”

“But I’ve known it.”

“I mean... I’ve never said it to
anyone.”

“Good. Then I’m the first.”

“You still don’t understand. I’ve never believed love exists. I don’t know if I can say it... and
mean
it. Not even to you.”

She was the first person to whom he had ever revealed anything of what had happened to him, and he talked for an hour, dredging up both familiar and long-repressed details of his nightmare childhood. The beatings. The bruises, the split lips, the blackened eyes, the broken bones. Scalded once with a pan of hot water that his mother threw at him. The scar was still between his shoulders. He’d turned from her just in time. Otherwise, his face would have borne the scar, and he might have been blinded. He recalled the psychological torture that filled every potential empty space between the physical assaults, like mortar in a stone wall. The insults, vicious teasing. The shouting, cursing. The unrelenting denigration and humiliation. Periodically they had locked him in a closet, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes for two or three days. No light. Food and water only if they remembered to provide it....

At first, as he journeyed through his troubled past, his voice was supercharged with hatred, but gradually hatred gave way to hurt, and he found that he was grieving for the child he might have been and for the man into which that child might have grown. That was another Alex Hunter, lost forever, who perhaps would have been a better—certainly a happier—person than the Alex who had survived. As he talked, the memory sludge gushed from him in much the way that guilt might flow from a devout Catholic in a confessional, and when at last he stopped, he felt mercifully cleaner and freer than ever before in his life.

She kissed his eyes.

“Sorry,” he said, ashamed of the pent-up tears that blurred his vision and that he was barely able to hold back.

“What for?”

“I never cry.”

“That’s part of your problem.”

“I never wanted them to have the satisfaction of seeing me cry, so I learned to keep everything inside.” He forced a smile. “This is the man you’re relying on. Still have any confidence in him?”

“More confidence than ever. You seem human now.”

More than ever, she wanted to make love, and so did he. But he needed to exercise the iron will and self-control that his monstrous parents had unwittingly taught him. “With you, Joanna, it’s got to be right. Special. With you I want to wait until I
can
say those three little words and mean them. For the rest of my life, I’ll carry with me every detail of the first time we make love, and from now on I don’t intend to lug around anything but
good
memories.”

“And neither do I. We’ll wait.”

She turned out the lights, and they lay together on the bed.

Shadows pooled around them. They were beyond the direct reach of the thin streams of morning sun that drizzled through the narrow gaps in the draperies.

Holding each other, kissing chastely, they were neither lovers nor would-be lovers. Rather, they were like animals in a burrow, pressing against each other for reassurance, warmth, and protection from the mysterious forces of a hostile universe.

Eventually he dozed off. When he woke, he was alone on the bed. At first he thought that he heard rain beating on the windows, but then he realized it was the sound of the shower, coming through the half-open door from the adjacent bathroom.

In a peculiar but comfortably domestic mood, he returned to the guest room, showered, and changed the bandage on his left arm. The shallow knife wounds were healing well.

By the time he dressed and got to the kitchen, Joanna was preparing a light breakfast:
shiro dashi,
white
miso
-flavored soup. Floating in each bowl was a neat tie of
kanpyo,
paper-thin gourd shavings, topped by a dab of hot mustard. The soup was properly served in a red dish with a gold rim, in keeping with the Japanese belief that a man “eats with his eyes as well as his mouth.”

In this instance, however, Alex was at odds with traditional Japanese wisdom. He couldn’t look away from Joanna long enough to appreciate the presentation of the
shiro dashi.

Outside, a chill wind stripped dead leaves from a nearby mulberry tree and blew them against the kitchen window, startling him. It was a scarecrow sound, dry and brittle—and somehow more ominous than it should have been.

Streaked with rust-maroon the same shade as dried blood, the crisp brown leaves spun against the glass, and for a moment he half thought that they were about to coalesce into a monstrous face. Instead, the capricious wind suddenly carried them up and out of sight into the dead sky.

For a long time Joanna stared at the mulberry tree. Her mood, like his, had inexplicably changed.

After breakfast, Alex called Ted Blankenship’s home number in Chicago. He wanted Ted to use Bonner-Hunter’s contacts in England, respected colleagues in the private-security trade, to dig up all available information on the United British-Continental Insurance Association and on the solicitor J. Compton Woolrich.

He and Joanna passed the remainder of the morning with the Chelgrin file, searching for new clues. They didn’t find any.

Mariko joined them for lunch at a restaurant two blocks from the Moonglow, and then Joanna drove them directly to the hospital to see Wayne Kennedy. The police had already been there. Wayne had told them only what Alex wanted him to reveal, and they’d seemed satisfied—or at least not terribly suspicious. Wayne was just as Mariko had described him the previous night: brimming with energy in spite of his condition, joking with everyone, demanding to know when he would be permitted to walk, “because if I lay here much longer, my legs will atrophy.” One of the nurses spoke English, and Wayne tried to convince her that he’d come to Japan to enter a tap-dancing contest and was determined to participate on crutches if necessary. The nurse was amused, but Wayne’s best audience was Mariko. Alex had never seen her so animated and cheerful as she was in that small, clean, but decidedly dreary hospital room.

At three o’clock he and Joanna left to keep an appointment with Dr. Omi Inamura, but Mariko remained at the hospital.

The leaden sky had darkened and descended since they’d arrived at the hospital, as if a solar eclipse was in progress behind the vault of clouds.

In Joanna’s Lexus, as she drove across the busy city, Alex said, “From now on, Mariko’s going to put her match-making energy to work for herself.”

“What do you mean?”

“You didn’t notice the attraction between them?”

“Who? Mariko and Wayne?”

“It was obvious to me.”

On the sidewalks, pedestrians hurried stoop-shouldered through a cold, brisk wind that flapped their coattails.

“I don’t doubt Mariko and Wayne are attracted to each other, but nothing’ll come of it,” Joanna predicted. “Sad to say, but there’s a strong cultural bias here against interracial relationships. If you aren’t Japanese, then you’re regarded as one degree of barbarian or another. It’s almost not something you can become angry about when you encounter their prejudice, because they’re so unfailingly polite about it, and they do treat everyone with great respect. It’s just been a part of their worldview so long that it’s in their bones.”

Alex frowned. “Mariko doesn’t think of you as a barbarian.”

“Not entirely. She’s a modem woman, but in some deep recess of her Japanese soul, the attitude is still present. On a subconscious level maybe, but it’s there. And she’s definitely not modern enough ... for Wayne.”

“I suspect you’re wrong about that. She believes in love at first sight, you know.”

“Mariko?”

“She told me.”

“She was talking about Wayne?”

“About you and me. But she believes in it for herself too. Love at first sight.”

“Is he good enough for her?” Joanna asked.

“He’s first-rate, I think.”

“Well, then, I hope she’s even more of a modern woman than I think she is.”

Joanna parked half a block from Omi Inamura’s office but did not switch off the engine. Staring at his building through the windshield, she said, “Maybe this is a mistake.”

“Why?”

“I’m scared.”

“I’ll be with you.”

“What if Inamura
can
help me remember the face and name of the man with the mechanical hand? Then we’ll have to go looking for him, won’t we?”

“Yes.”

“And when we find him ...”

“Don’t worry. It’s like Mariko said last night. When you finally find him, he won’t be as frightening as he is in your nightmares.”

“No. Not as frightening. Maybe worse.”

“Think positive,” he said.

He reached out and took her hand. It was cold and moist.

A piercing wail rose in the distance. Traffic pulled aside to allow an ambulance to pass. The shrieking siren filled the world for a moment. In the gray-on-gray day, the fierce red light from the revolving emergency beacons seemed to have preternatural substance: It splashed like blood across the street, washed through the car in an intangible tide, and briefly transformed Joanna’s face into a mask that might have been the universal face of any spattered victim, blue eyes wide but sightless and darkened by a glimpse of Death’s own cold face in the penultimate moment.

Alex shivered.

“I’m ready,” she said. She let go of his hand and switched off the car engine.

The siren had dwindled beyond hearing. The splashing red light was gone. Once again, the day was dead gray.

Bowing not from the waist but with a discreet inclination of his head and a rounding of his shoulders, not with any disrespect but with a sense that he understood the need for the old traditions while being personally somewhat above them, Dr. Omi Inamura welcomed Joanna and Alex into his inner office. He was in his early fifties, an inch shorter than Joanna, with slightly crinkled, papery skin and brown eyes as warm as his quick smile. In black slacks, suspenders, white shirt, baggy gray cardigan, and half-lens reading glasses, he seemed more like a literature professor than a psychiatrist.

The inner office, where Inamura treated his patients, was reassuringly cozy. One wall featured floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with books, and another was covered by a tapestry depicting a wooded mountainside, a foaming waterfall, and a river where accordion-sail boats were running with the wind toward a small village just below the cataracts. Instead of a traditional analyst’s couch, four dark-green armchairs were arranged around a low coffee table. The pine-slat blinds closed out the ashen daylight, and the electric lighting was indirect, soft, relaxing. A sweet, elusive fragrance threaded the air: perhaps lemon incense.

In one corner, a large birdcage hung from a brass stand.

On a perch in the cage was a coal-black myna with eyes that were simultaneously bright and dark, like little drops of oil glistening in moonlight. From Mariko, they had learned that its name was Freud.

They sat in the armchairs, and Alex told Omi Inamura about Lisa Chelgrin’s inexplicable metamorphosis into Joanna Rand. Mariko had prepared her uncle to expect a strange case, so the doctor was neither greatly surprised nor disbelieving. He was even cautiously optimistic about the chances of conducting a successful program of hypnotic regression therapy.

“However,” Omi Inamura said, “ordinarily, I wouldn’t employ hypnosis until I’d done extensive groundwork with you, Miss Rand. I find that it’s always wise to begin with certain standard tests, a series of casual conversations, another series of investigative dialogues. I progress slowly, and I thoroughly explore the patient’s problems until trust has been established. Then I use hypnosis only if it is indicated. This takes time. Weeks. Months.”