A Cruel Season for Dying (15 page)

Last night the drug had failed him, calling forth not the glory of the vision he’d regained inside the tunnel but vivid memories
of his human life before the accident. Tonight he felt only the pain of loss, belonging nowhere, a creature neither of Heaven
nor of Earth. He longed for human comfort. And the peace, no matter how false, of the life he had had before his awakening.
He wanted
not to know.

But he did know. That there was no happiness that lasted, no love. That the forgetfulness he craved tonight was a trap. That
forgetting, that denying his mission, meant dying not once but again and again, reincarnating over and over, with no more
chances to escape the flesh he had once desired above all things but was now his prison. This was the war again from before
men and time, and he was a warrior, hunting MIAs in another kind of jungle. An irony in a life of ironies.

The bar he went into was filled with the light of the Fallen, but a murky light, dulled by alcohol and drugs, by the lust
that was a sign of the real union lost. The dance went on around him, broken and maimed, a sad reflection almost beyond bearing
tonight. He bought a whiskey at the bar and walked it to a shadowed table where there was less chance of being approached.
He needed to think.

He swallowed half the drink. He had no choice but to go on. The question was how long he could remain safe in this city. He
had been careful, but eventually he might make a mistake, especially with Zavebe.

He could get out now, leave the life of this human shell behind. He could move to another city. He had plenty of money from
the insurance settlements. But where better for his research than New York? Given his real enemy, the police were gnats.

Gnats with bullets, he reminded himself. This was spiritual war fought on an earthly plane. Capture was unthinkable, a double
prison truly beyond his bearing. And his death the most ironic of failures. Still it seemed crazy to consider leaving.

No,
he
was crazy. But was he? He wished that he were.

He knocked down the last of his drink. Got up. Pushed through the gathered bodies, through the luminescent fog of sickly light
and smoke. Back on the street, he headed toward the Harley, giving up the search that was less than halfhearted tonight.

As always the aura of a great one came as a shock—the overwhelming brilliance anchored but uncontained by the black seed of
flesh in which it dwelt. The boy at the center of the brightness stood at the edge of the sidewalk. Eyes darting, trolling
the cruising cars, he half lounged, half danced along the curb, shopping grimy adolescent cool, as if the thrift shop jacket
and dirty jeans were mere affectation.

He made an instant decision, closing the distance between them, heading off the blue Volvo pulling to the curb. The boy, already
leaning toward the fleeting invitation of the car, jerked upward toward him in a small moment of anger. But changed his mind
and smiled.

Hanae shut her eyes to concentrate the light. A blind woman’s sight carved from darkness. Yet she had trouble focusing. The
only illumination she could gather was a thin anemic veil that seemed threatened by shadows hovering just inside the limits
of her inner vision.

That she was incapable of drawing in the light probably had to do with the current of complex emotions that flowed through
her. She reached and touched the place where the child was growing. Happiness should have ignited the flame inside her. But
yet she struggled.

Nori.
Nori would ease her mind. At least for a time. She inserted the cassette and listened to the pleasant sounds of her cousin’s
Japanese litany as it crackled off the tape. The research trials at the laboratory were going well despite Dr. Murasaki’s
interference. Nori had no patience with the male-dominated system that afforded her entrance into the biomedical field only
because of her impressive academic achievements.

Murasaki wants me to trade my lab coat for a dark dress that covers my knees. To shuffle behind a husband who will expect
nothing beyond the breeding of intelligent children and clever shopping.

Nori at twenty-four was dangerously close to becoming a Christmas cake—an unmarried girl past desirability.

I cannot love Hiroshi.
Nori’s tone betrayed an uncommon sadness.
My heart yearns to, but my soul will not allow it.
Her voice hardened.
His words are earnest, but he will become my father, should we marry.

I
… Nori faltered.
I had a dream.

Hanae moved closer to the machine, her fingers adjusting the volume.

I am walking down a long corridor. There is just enough light so that I do not stumble over my own feet. My shoes make cricket
sounds against the floor. I am myself, yet I am not.

A cold, wet wind ruffles a long line of curtains hung on metal rods, but their hems do not touch the floor. I can see that
each drape hides a small enclosure. One of the curtains billows, and I see two shoeless feet dangling. I am conscious of my
hand pushing against the fabric.

She is young. Her black hair chopped short, with thick bangs covering her brows. Her face is snow white. Her mouth red with
thick lipstick. Her head slumps against a naked shoulder, and her tiny body swings against its own weight. Stockings pulled
tight by a garter belt cover her plump legs. She is dead, yet her fingers fight the edge of a pale corset, binding her like
a kind of orthopedic device. She struggles to cover her exposed vagina.

Tears fall from closed lids. She is clearly embarrassed by the immodesty of her own death, by the shameless display of her
body.

I am horrified, but I cannot resist. I push at one curtain after another. Behind each a young woman is hanging, tugging at
the corset to hide herself. I accept this as some kind of ritual suicide, but there is ambivalence
…. Nori’s sigh. Then,
Hanae, what does the dream mean?

She snapped off the recorder, pressed her mouth into a hard line. She would have to reply to her cousin. She must tell Nori
that her dream was no more than a mirror of her fear of marriage to Hiroshi. Her family expected such guidance, but she did
not always want to see beneath the mist that shrouded the mountain.

At four, behind her blind eyes, she had
seen
her grandmother fall— the missed step bringing her to the ground, her head hard against the stone lantern in the garden.
It had been her first prophetic vision. One that had brought tears to her eyes and had caused her mother and father to think
she was ill. She had had a fever, her body on fire like the
fire beneath the lids of her eyes illuminating the death of her grandmother. Over and over she had repeated her grandmother’s
name, begging to see her.

“Bad dream.” Mama-san had whispered those words in her ear.

But she had not been sleeping. Only in her bed playing with her favorite doll.

Later that evening, when her uncle had come to the house, she knew his words before they were spoken. And after, her mother
had taken her into her arms, holding her so tightly that she could feel her frightened heart against her own chest. For a
time she harbored a child’s guilt, never certain whether her vision had made what had happened so.

Taiko stirred. She ran her foot down the length of his spine. What would he make of the new one? She shook away the thought.
She did not have Dr. Blanchard’s confirmation. Yet she had known the last time, even before she’d seen a doctor.

But she had lost the baby. After only three months she had miscarried. The life slipping away in a small flood between her
thighs. Jimmy had been more concerned with her own health than the loss of the child. But she was inconsolable for months.
And later a softer sadness had settled inside her, which she had hidden from Jimmy, and most of the time from her own awareness.
Except when she visited the little shrine to Jizo she had constructed in her heart and made offerings in remembrance of her
water child.

She should not wait for the doctor’s appointment to tell Jimmy. She should tell him tonight. She listened for the door of
the
genkan
to open. Silence. Lightly she touched Taiko’s head with the tip of her toe and sighed. Her husband was once again late.

“Why don’t you pack it up, Lieutenant?” Pat Kelly’s nicotine-wasted voice caught Sakura off guard.

“What’s your excuse, Kelly?”

“Nothing waiting for me at home.”

Sakura picked up his cup, took a sip. “Cold.”

Kelly came into the office, slumped into a chair. He fished inside his
jacket, unplugging a cigarette from a crumpled pack. “So what’re you thinking?” He hitched an unlit unfiltered between his
teeth.

He stood and walked to the window. “I don’t like this waiting.”

Kelly grunted. “He’ll ante up soon enough.”

“I know.” He came back and sat down behind his desk.

“Lorenzo.” Kelly chuckled. A smoker’s laugh.

Nate Lorenzo. Captain Nathan Lorenzo. An NYPD cop accused of hiring a hit on his wife. His first murder case. A case no one
else wanted to touch. Taboo. Even Internal Affairs had played it soft.

“Excuse my language, Lieutenant, but it took big balls to go after Lorenzo.”

“It was my job.”

Kelly shook his head. “There’re ways to do the job, and then there’re ways.”

“I know only one way.”

“That’s what I mean, Lieutenant. This serial ain’t got nothing on Lorenzo. You’ll get him.”

“I don’t feel so confident, Kelly. It’s been two weeks.”

Kelly shrugged, nursing the cold cigarette. “Can’t figure a crazy.”

He picked up the jade disk. “Something is about to happen.”

“That’s the only way we get moving. The only way we get the son of a bitch off the streets.”

“Somebody will die.”

“Somebody always dies, Lieutenant.”

“It feels bad, Kelly.”

The vet half stood, stuffing the worked-over cigarette into his pocket. “That’s how you and Darius got along so well. God
knows nobody else could.”

“What do you mean?”

“Those feelings you two get.”

No, he didn’t have Darius’s instincts. “I’m not like Michael.”

“Closer than you think.” Kelly grinned. “You just don’t know it.” Fully rising from his seat, and with what was an extraordinary
gesture, he reached across the desk and clasped his arm.

Sakura looked down, covering the old detective’s hand with his own. When he looked up, the air glinted between them. Then
he felt
the vet’s hand slip from beneath his. The sergeant grinned. It was as close to a real smile as he would likely get from Pat
Kelly.

The room had a sour coldness, but Jude Pinot, standing near the bed, had begun to peel off his clothes. His eyes were shut,
which somehow made it easier. Even in the darkness he hated to look at this dump, a flop he shared with two other guys. Holing
up to sleep like bats in the daylight. Flittering back and forth at night.

At least in the house in Jersey, things had been warm and clean. He could still see his mother, if he wanted, like a movie
inside his lids. On her hands and knees, scrubbing at old linoleum more chipped and faded than she was. Working away, as if
it were the germs she always talked about that had left him with bruises and broken ribs, instead of that bastard she’d married.