Woman with a Blue Pencil (23 page)

Spade would have treated the poor woman's corpse better.

But Sumida had never seen carnage like this—never even imagined it. In a Universal Pictures horror film the violence looked so phony that the experience never lost its fun, whatever the monstrous plot. And Picasso's brilliantly powerful
Guernica
mythologized violence rather than reproducing it. But this was real. And as Sumida's adrenalin, which had initially sustained him, began to fade, he felt sick and had to steady himself to keep from vomiting.

What kind of sorry PI paled at violence?

Only then did he wonder: Might the killer still be here?

He removed the .38 from the back waistband of his trousers, his hand trembling. With his other hand, he moved the tiny light in a wide arc.

Aside from the corpses he was alone.

What had happened here and why?

And where was his wife?

Was one of these dead men the Federal agent? He doubted it, as the victims identical attire contradicted the plan for a solitary assailant that he'd read about in the stolen government report.

He swallowed hard. Then he almost laughed, his nerves still badly shaken. Earlier, he had thought things couldn't get worse for him. Yet now he was virtually trapped in a shack on the Long Beach pier, hundreds of Caucasians wandering outside (a quarter of them likely drunk), with three corpses here and no explanation for his presence among them that would satisfy even the most sympathetic cop or juror. (As if these days there even
were
such things as sympathetic authorities for his kind.)

The intelligence report about this being the rendezvous point for the agent and the Orchid had to have been wrong. Or perhaps the mission had been aborted due to this violence. In either case, he'd have to move the men's bodies to squeeze back out the door and distance himself from the crime scene.

He grabbed the first man by the hands and dragged him away from the door.

That's when he saw it.

A portion of the Turkish rug had been pulled up as he dragged the man across it.

Beneath, a trapdoor.

Excerpt from chapter fourteen of
The Orchid and the Secret Agent
, a novel by William Thorne

Metropolitan Modern Mysteries, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1945

. . . having piled the beaten and strangled bodies of Shinji and Kento, one of whom had carried the handcuff keys in his pocket, atop one another near the front entrance, then descending through the trapdoor and down the wooden ladder, Jimmy Park stood now on the catwalk beneath the pier. The Jap heavies had been less difficult to defeat than he'd anticipated, his expert Taekwondo moves seeming new to them, which made him wonder if the pair had been intended more as a test of his skills than to actually rough him up. No matter. They were dead now. His mission prospects had improved from being seriously threatened, back when he'd had a gun held to the back of his head, to certain success, as he now saw the Orchid standing thirty yards away, leaning against the catwalk's wooden railing, her back to him and her attention seemingly focused on the moonlit, rolling breakers not far below. He could put two bullets in her from this distance, one in her head and the other through her back to her heart. But he had a few questions. And, just maybe, he wanted to see her face one more time before he ended her life.

She could not have heard his descent, as the fireworks far above the pier and the waves here below would have concealed the sound of his opening and closing the trapdoor, his feet on the wooden ladder, his cocking the gun. Nonetheless, she turned, calmly and purposefully, as if she knew just the moment he touched down on the three-foot-wide, wooden catwalk, as if she was not in the least surprised to find him unaccompanied by her goons.

Just then, the fireworks stopped.

The Pike crowd roared their appreciation for the aerial display.

Smiling, the Orchid applauded too, even as her eyes bored into his.

He was struck by the timing of the fireworks' grand finale. Suddenly, it was comparatively quiet down here, even as the ordinary sounds of the midway continued (the calliope, the roller coaster, the hum of myriad voices) and the waves rhythmically washed past the big wooden pylons. Had some invisible stage manager cued the fireworks ending, in anticipation of his leading actress's opening lines?

Indeed, the Orchid took a step toward Jimmy.

He showed the gun.

She shrugged as if it were nothing. “Do you think it is an accident that we are down here together, just the two of us? Or that you are holding a gun while I am unarmed? Do you think I would have made myself mortally vulnerable to any man, especially one who works clandestinely with the government of the United States, if I did not already know that man's mind, even if he still does not fully know it himself?”

“I know my mind,” he answered, continuing slowly toward her.

She stopped, leaning against the wooden railing. “I love it down here, suspended between worlds.” She looked up. “The topside of the pier above, crowded, noisy . . .” Then she looked over the side. “The dark, rolling ocean below, mysterious and unconcerned with humanity . . .” She turned back to Jimmy. “And I, suspended here on these narrow planks, between worlds, at peace in the shadows.”

Jimmy wasn't taken in by her poetry. If he was distracted by anything it was by trying to figure out the engineering purpose of this catwalk, from which other wooden ladders led up to other trap doors at regular intervals for the entire length of the pier. Suspended by iron poles to the underside of the pier, the catwalk looked like it had been built long ago. Was it used for maintenance of the pylons? No matter. The Orchid had found her use: privacy among a crowd. This same privacy would serve Jimmy's purpose as well.

“You don't seem much interested in what I have to say,” she observed. “So why haven't you already killed me?”

He took a few more steps toward her. “Maybe I wasn't sure I could hit you from that distance.”

She scoffed. “I know how well you shoot, Jimmy. You could have put one between my eyes from twice that range.”

Between the eyes
. Jimmy recalled Mr. Barratt's instruction.

“Do you know the one thing I don't like about being down here?” she asked.

He said nothing, but kept his gun aimed at her head.

“It's that the swirling breezes off the water, so refreshing to exposed flesh, make it quite impossible for a girl to light a cigarette,” she said.

He laughed. “Don't think I'm going to light one for you.”

“Of course not, Jimmy. Besides, you probably think smoking is unhealthy, being such a straight shooter, if I may use that term colloquially even as you are actually holding a gun on me. Forgive the pun. Now, don't you want to ask me why I'd put myself in this position, why I'd risk my life on my certainty that, whatever you think now, you will shortly come over to my side?”

He waited.

She waited too, until at last: “If you want an answer, you'll have to ask,” she said.

“Okay,” he conceded. “Why?”

“Because you're my brother. By blood.”

He hadn't expected a whopper like that. He laughed. “That's the best you can do?”

“Oh, I don't lack for imagination. I could have come up with more immediately effective arguments for your coming over to my side, Jimmy. But all those other arguments would have lacked one thing. The truth. So, in this instance, I decided to go with that.”

He shook his head dismissively. “So, you're telling me you're not Japanese.”

“No, I'm telling you that you
are
Japanese.” She shrugged. “Well, half.”

He knew the right course was to delay no longer, but to put one between her eyes. But he didn't pull the trigger, wanting to shame her first. “Go on, sister.”

She shook her head. “If you're going to treat the premise as if it's a joke, I would rather you shoot me now.”

“Shoot my own sister?”

“See, a joke,” she snapped. “Pull the damn trigger, you son of a bitch.”

He didn't.

“Go on, explain yourself,” he said, wiping the sarcasm from his voice.

She folded her hands in front of her as if delivering a speech.

“You were born on February 13, 1911, in Seoul, Korea, which I don't have to tell you had been annexed the previous year by the Empire of Japan.”

“Thanks for reminding me of my birthday and offering a basic history lesson.”

She ignored him, continuing: “Your mother, Kyung-Sun, and your father, Seung, left Korea without proper Japanese authorization sixteen months later, arriving on these shores and calling upon connections to gain entrance. Here, you became a veritable Andy Hardy, All-American. But have you ever wondered why your parents went to such ends to escape their homeland.”

“Jap occupation, for one,” he answered. “And the promise of America for another.”

She sighed. “I'm sorry to tell you that your mother was assaulted in the first months of the occupation by a Japanese soldier named Himura, which means ‘Scarlet Village,' resulting in her pregnancy with you. Your adopted, Korean ‘father' did the honorable thing of marrying Kyung-Sun despite her disgrace. He gave you his name. But you are no Park. You are a Himura, like me. Yes, the soldier was my father. I am not proud of his actions. They were dishonorable. But I am here to make amends with you by welcoming you into your true family as if you were not half-mongrel. No one ever need know. And, together, we will do great things.”

“That's quite a story.”

She nodded. “We'll bring honor to our ancestors.”

He stepped closer, having heard enough. “Where you go wrong, my lovely and deadly Orchid, is that I am color-blind, which is an inherited trait. No one in my mother's family suffers from this minor impairment. But my father, Seung Park, is also color-blind. So, you see, he
is
my true father, in every way. My color blindness is a personal detail I don't advertise. Still, you've been misinformed. Your researchers dropped the ball, if you'll forgive an Americanism.”

Her eyes widened in surprise at this turn.

He raised the gun to her forehead. “Give a girl enough rope . . . You have made your final mistake, sister.”

Excerpt from a letter May 25, 1943:

. . . and so, while I appreciate the dramatic ambiguity created by Jimmy's color-blindness being a brilliant fabrication on his part, such a ruse nonetheless has the effect of allowing for the possibility that he actually
might
be
her half-brother, and I fear we mustn't indulge the idea that our hero may be half-Japanese. So let's streamline the scene and make his color-blindness simply true rather than a ruse, removing all doubt and thereby trapping the conniving Orchid in an unequivocal lie. I love that!

Happy note: at the editorial meeting, my colleagues rallied behind the idea that the Orchid has “the potential” to drive an entire series, even as a villain, much as Dr. Fu Manchu has made a boatload of money for author and publisher. Of course, this would depend on the sales of the first book, and so at this time we can't offer you a contract for a sequel or subsequent titles in a series. But the prospects are good. Isn't it exciting news, Takumi! Particularly as you'd expressed some hesitation at actually killing off the Orchid. (I think your commercial radar was working in ways you may not even have recognized!)

In any case, we still need to provide a satisfying climax to
The Orchid and the Secret Agent
. After all, Jimmy Park can't simply be defeated at the end. But that's where the Orchid's ominous bodyguard comes in—the Phantom. Look, with your enlistment coming up in less than a month, and the actual, contracted deadline for the completed draft on the heels of that, I don't think there's time to go back and establish rich character details for the Phantom without dislodging the house of cards we've constructed. However, the more I think about it, the more I think his being a mysterious figure right up to the end, when his appearance is revealed, against type, to be that of an “ordinary” man, is quite effective. Perhaps as foreshadowing you could put something in earlier about the Phantom's presumed “man on the street” appearance. Maybe in one of Jimmy's conversations with Mr. Barratt . . . And
if
this proves to be the first book in a series about the duel between Jimmy and the Orchid, then our hero's elimination of her top bodyguard will be, I think, a sufficient and satisfying climax for book #1. Anyway, I know you'll figure something out, as you always do!