The Miko - 02 (58 page)

“Lieutenant,” he said meditatively, “this intense heat activity. Where would you place it, exactly?”

“That’s difficult to say, sir.” Russilov bent over the readout. “As you know, this comes from a long way up. And, of course, our technicians have had to piece it together to get the whole.”

“Nevertheless,” Protorov pursued, “I want your best guess.”

Russilov took his time, producing a jeweler’s loupe with which he routinely scanned the readout. At length he stood up, dropping the magnifier into his cupped palm.

“If I were put to it, sir,” he began, “I would have to say that part of the activity is coming from Japanese territory.”

Protorov’s pulse picked up a beat. “And the other part?”

“The other part, it seems to me, is coming from Russian sovereign territory.”

Alix Logan was in the shower. Croaker sat in an easy chair in the large, neatly furnished room. He was sipping a bourbon and water that room service had brought up.

He was tired and he let his head fall back against the chair, closing his eyes. He still felt the slight motion vertigo from having been in the car eighteen straight hours. He would have preferred to fly out of Key West but that would have been suicidal, like putting a “Come Follow Me” sign on their backs.

No, all things considered, a car had been best. At the least it afforded them the option of changing destinations any time they pleased.

Dimly he heard the shower running. He thought again of what it had felt like to have Alix Logan sitting beside him for all that uninterrupted time. The sun-streaked hair falling now and again on his shoulder, those piercing green eyes, the model’s lithe, taut-fleshed body, the skin tanned and smooth as cream.

And that led him to thoughts of Angela Didion, the other model and Alix Logan’s best friend. But none of the fame Angela Didion had amassed, none of the myriad rumors about her mattered a damn at the moment Croaker had entered her apartment and found her sprawled across her bed, naked save for a thin gold chain around her waist, and very dead.

She was no beauty queen then, no superbly madeup sex goddess, the vision of every man’s fantasy. Stripped so harshly of life she was merely a young girl, pathetic in her ultimate vulnerability. And she had moved Croaker more then than she ever had in life.

He remembered that moment well. How he had wanted more than anything else to wave some magic wand and resurrect her. Not for himself. Just for her. In death she was only a human being and therefore far more than she ever had been as a cover girl for
Vogue
and
Cosmopolitan,
where she had been drenched in two-dimensional unreality.

In one sense that seemed a very little thing to set him on this long, torturous quest. A tiny thing over which to lose one’s own life. But when one thought of it another way, it was the only truly honorable thing to do. And Lew Croaker had learned about the importance of honor from his best friend, Nicholas Linnear.

Now Alix opened the door to the steamy bathroom and emerged with a thick towel wrapped around her, another, smaller one wrapped as a turban around her hair.

Croaker’s eyes snapped open and for a moment he saw not her but Angela Didion and he found renewed determination not to let Alix Logan die, which she surely would if the Blue Monster ever caught wind of their whereabouts.

“You’re next,” she said, giving him that direct, disconcerting look that seemed to penetrate his skull. “You look like death warmed over.”

Croaker grunted and finished off his drink. “Funny. I feel worse than that.”

She sat down on one of the double beds, her hands in her lap. “Why are you doing this? That’s what I’d like to know. They’ll kill you if they catch you. You know that, don’t you.”

“It’s because of Angela.”

“You didn’t even know her,” Alix said. “You were in love with that face just like everyone else.”

“You don’t get it at all,” he said, shifting in his seat.

“And I never will,” she said archly, “unless you explain it to me.”

“She died on my turf.” He swirled the ice around the empty glass, staring at the cubes but looking at nothing at all. “Someone did her in; I want to find out who. Because she was a person just like anyone else. She deserved that much, at least.”

Alix gave a short laugh. “I’m in a better position to know what she deserved.” She paused for a moment as if gathering herself. “She was a bitch, Lew. She was mean, vindictive, insanely jealous, and absolutely venal.”

Croaker looked up at her. “None of that matters. To me she was no better or worse than anyone else.”

Alix poured herself a drink from the bottle of Old Grand-Dad. “You should’ve spent some time with her,” she said, taking a swallow neat. “A couple’ve days, that’s all it would’ve taken.”

Croaker took the glass out of her hand, finished what she had in there. “Were you in love with her?”

“That’s none of your goddamned business!” she flared at him. Her hands clenched into whitened fists and her lips compressed into a thin unattractive line. Then her face began to break apart a small piece at a time.

“Just because you saved my life, what makes you think you can expect answers like that out of me?” By then she was weeping, her sun-baked shoulders heaving, her hands covering her face.

Croaker watched her for a time, suppressing the urge to reach out for her and comfort her; he knew her well enough now to know she would pull back from such a gesture.

After a while her hands came down and she wiped at her eyes. She seemed a great deal calmer. “The truth is,” she said softly, “Angela was in love with me.” She ran long fingers through her wet hair after unwinding the towel. She began to rub it through her hair. “I could never remember my mother, and Angela was strong. I guess there was a lot of the male in her. Not that she was masculine. It wasn’t that at all. I’m talking about something inside. Her personality or whatever.

“She caught me. I honestly don’t know how else to put it. I knew she was a bitch from working with her. And I knew she was into drugs: opium and coke. Nice combo, huh? But I thought…Oh, I don’t know what I thought. I suppose I blinded myself to all those things because I needed a mother; someone to show me the ropes and protect me.”

Alix stopped fussing with her hair, sat again with her hands in her lap, so that she appeared very young, almost a little girl, innocent, made of spun pink candy. “We fought all the time. In many ways she made my life hell.”

“You could have walked out,” Croaker pointed out.

But Alix was already shaking her head. “Like I said, you didn’t know Angela. What she wanted, she kept until she was tired of it. She would have ruined me professionally if I’d tried to leave. She could have done it easily; she was quite the expert at it. I saw her do it once to a young model coming up who said the wrong thing to her one day. Angela made one phone call and no one in the business even spoke that girl’s name again. Angela had the power of a pharaoh.”

Her head came down so far that Croaker could see the soft bit of light down at the nape of her neck. “But the truth is, I didn’t have the strength to leave her. She…frightened me and, oddly I suppose, within the power of her manipulation I felt more secure than I had outside on my own in the world.”

There was a silence that stretched itself, filling the room with an odd kind of chill.

“Then what happened?” Croaker prompted.

“Then everything changed,” Alix said, her voice so soft Croaker had to lean forward to hear her properly. “Angela met Raphael Tomkin.”

Jesse James had picked up the bastard’s name, Tex Bristol, from the harbormaster at the Key West marina when the man and several others who had been on the dock at the time had noticed his boat leaving its slip just after Alix Logan’s had.

James did not know who the bastard really was, but he promised himself he would soon find out. He had asked for Bristol by name at the front desk, figuring the bastard wouldn’t see any reason to change the alias at this stage, but he had been wrong. He had been told that no Bristol with the first name of Tex or with any other first name had registered that day.

The Blue Monster had launched into explanation C, going the full route, showing a badge. He was a private detective, a case of adultery, here are the descriptions of the pair, nothing to get het up about, just serving divorce papers, et cetera. He got their room number. One room. Very cozy, James thought. What does this bastard have that I don’t? He took the elevator up.

The doors opened and Jesse James emerged onto the third floor of the hotel.

Croaker had just come out of the shower. He felt thirty years better. Toweling himself dry, he put on the lightweight slacks, dark blue T-shirt with “KEY WEST IS BEST” stenciled in green across the chest, and his tattered topsiders that he had brought with him into the bathroom.

Alix wore a pair of cutoff jeans and a pink cap-sleeve silk shirt. Her bare toes curled on the bedspread. She was sitting up, her back against a pair of pillows, reading a paperback book she had picked up at the place along the highway where they had stopped for lunch.

“This thing’s as bad as the food we had this afternoon,” she said, throwing the book away from her. “Vampire’s in the bayous. Who’s kidding who?”

That was when the door to the hall burst open with a crack like a rifle shot.

Sato found his guest in the garden. In the rain.

“My dear friend,” he called from the dry sanctuary of his study, “you’ll catch your death of cold out there.”

Nicholas did not answer at once. His shoulders were slumped as he sat on the stone seat, facing the swaying branches of the boxwood. There was a fat gray plover strutting impatiently back and forth along a dry patch near the wide bole. Every so often it cocked its head upward, its glaring eye seeming to curse the foul elements.

As for Nicholas, he barely noticed the wetness. The kimono was soaked through and there was not a part of him that was dry. It did not matter. He knew now that Akiko and Yukio were two separate entities.

Deceit could only be taken so far. A face could lie, for instance, whispered words, even a knowing glance. But a body was different. Response to an intimate touch, the softening, the opening, all these were unique. They could not be counterfeited.

An unutterable sadness filled him at the thought that he had lost her all over again. Of course it had been an impossibility that she should be alive. Logic dictated that she had died by Saigō’s hand just as he had described it to Nicholas, savoring each word’s effect on his hated cousin.

Yet Nicholas, for the first time in his life perhaps, had not heeded logic. He had thrown a lifetime of training and understanding out for the possibility of one desperate hope. It was laughable and sad at the same time.

And he despised himself for the enjoyment he took from the adulterous joining. Though Akiko was not Yukio, still, he had made love to her with more than his body. Who she was and why she looked like his lost love became secondary to the knowledge that his heart was open to her. If she were not Yukio, could he love her anyway? By what magic was that possible? Or had some vital piece of Yukio’s somehow lodged in Akiko’s soul? In any case, he felt tainted, an outcast from himself. His misdeed had lost him his centricity, and without that he was powerless in a world gone mad.

“Linnear-san.” He could hear Sato’s voice raised above the racket of downpour. Then the older man was beside him, draping a clear plastic wrap across his shoulders. “Contemplation must conform to the elements which it honors,” he said softly. “I will leave you alone.”

“No, Sato-san. Please stay.” Abruptly, Nicholas did not want to be alone. He already felt too isolated, bereft almost. All his youthful dreams were gone. In the space of a thunderclap, wild hope had died. But what, he thought, is a human being without hope.

“This garden is most calming at all times of the day.” Sato moved beside him. He opened his mouth to continue, closed it as a crack of thunder rolled across the sky. “I’ve often thought that it is the shouting of the gods,” he said. “Thunder. I was awakened early this morning by the storm. I drowsed, listening to its cries. Almost human, don’t you think?”

“Very human, indeed,” Nicholas said. I must confess, he thought. I must return harmony to my spirit. “Sato-san—”

“The Chinese taught our forefathers geomancy,” Sato said, forestalling Nicholas, “so that we might forever remain in harmony with the forces of nature. We are not tigers, though we may strive to be. There is a perfection in that lesser state to which we human beings can only aspire.”

His eyes were liquid and soft as he looked down at Nicholas. And, quite startlingly, he put his hand on Nicholas’ shoulder. “Won’t you come inside now,” he said, “and allow me to brew you tea?”

Watching Russilov’s straight back disappear out the steel door, Protorov thought about how, after struggling for so many years to devote himself to the service of ideology, his life had taken on a personal cast. Not creating a family for himself he certainly saw as proof of his overriding dedication to the eventual worldwide triumph of Soviet ideals.

But now he had Russilov. How had that happened? His intense feeling for the young man caused him to feel vulnerable. And being vulnerable made him feel afraid.

Viktor Protorov had not been afraid for eight years. Not since the death of his older—and only—brother. At that time Protorov was head of the First Directorate, responsible for Russian internal security. Creating an unassailable kingdom for himself within the Ninth Directorate, a bastion from which to strike outward at the right time, to lead the motherland onward to global victory, was just dawning on him.

In the winter of that year—a particularly bitter one, filled with day after day of heavy snow—he had many missions running. All were important. In those days he lacked the internal clout to request more men for his understaffed directorate. He had learned to make do. But because of the acute manpower shortage and the inclemency of the weather he was forced to physically oversee more missions than he should have.

Consequently he had been outside Moscow, far to the north, when they had brought in Minck. Protorov had known of his presence inside Russia and had wanted him, badly. A fluke had landed him early, and he was inside Lubyanka when Protorov’s brother, of junior rank—a lieutenant—though he was three years older, learned of his presence.