Tengu (41 page)

Calsbeek gave
the order, and Evans and Guttiercz opened up two of the gasoline cans and began
circling the Tengu cautiously, swinging the cans back so that they could slosh
as much fuel over the creature as possible. The Tengu didn’t even flinch, but
kept walking slowly and deliberately across the lobby toward the reception
counter. Skrolnik and Calsbeek retreated from the counter, and climbed clumsily
around the edge of the ornamental pool to keep as much distance between themselves
and the Tengu as they possibly could.

The Tengu
hesitated for a second or two, confused by their movement.Then Skrolnik saw the
tiny foxfires glittering around its severed neck again, and it swung toward
them, its hands still extended, a grisly caricature of Frankenstein’s monster.
Skrolnik thought, I’m going to wake up in a minute. I’m going to wake up and
find that I’m late for breakfast. Oh, holy Jesus, please let me wake up in a
minute.
Or preferably sooner.

Pullet reached
across to the low coffee table in the middle of the waiting area and picked up
a copy of Los Angeles magazine. He attempted to rip it in half, but because
this was August, it was the 404-page restaurant-guide special, and he couldn’t
do it. “For Christ’s sake,” said Skrolnik. “Tear out individual pages, roll
them up,
make
a torch.”

Step by step,
they backed off toward the open hospital door. Evans and Guttierez splashed the
last of the third can of gasoline over the Tengu, until the creature was so
drenched that it gave off rippling fumes. Pullet had made his torch now, and
was lighting it with a book of matches.

The paper
flared up. The Tengu suddenly made a volent and unnervingy accurate rush toward
them. The ghostly blue fires around its shoulders roared up like a locomotive
roaring through a tunnel. Calsbeek said, “Oh, shit,” and collided with the
doorframe as he tried to scramble his way out. Skrolnik yelled, “Throw the
goddamned torch, PulletV

Pullet threw
it. It fell immediately to pieces and fluttered into separate blazing pages.
Skrolnik thought for one dreadful second that Pullet had missed altogether, but
then a wayward draft from the open door blew one of the burning pages up
against the Tengu’s chest.

The Tengu
stumbled toward them, arms outstretched, groping for them, but then the burning
paper ignited the gasoline on its chest and fanned a pattern of orange flames
across its ribcage.

There was a
dull, breathy, thumping noise, and the gasoline that Calsbeek’s two officers
had splashed into the Tengu’s lungs and stomach through its wide-open neck
exploded, and blew chunks of flaming flesh across the hospital patio.

The Tengu
staggered, burning fiercely from thighs to shoulders. It took one slow step
forward, then another, even though Skrolnik could see right through its charred
ribs to where the fire was blazing inside its chest, and its bones were
crackling and popping with heat.

Unnerved,
Calsbeek fired off two shots, but they made no impression on the Tengu at all.
It stood where it was, fiery and defiant, a walking corpse that refused to bow
down, even to immolation. It was only when the flesh of its thighs had actually
burned through to the femur that it spun around and collapsed onto the paving
stones with a noise of flaring fat.

Skrolnik limped
closer, and stood over the guttering body with horror and relief. As the flesh
burned away from the neck and upper cheset, the ax blade suddenly dropped onto
the patio with a clunk, and he jerked back in involuntary shock.

Calsbeek was
calling harshly on his radio for reinforcements, so that the hospital could be
screened off. The hospital administrator, with a great deal of shouting and
bustling about, had already arranged for the patients to be moved to different
rooms, away from the intensive-care unit where Admiral Thorson had been
murdered. The night was echoing with whooping choruses of sirens, and the trees
around the hospital were alight with the flashing of red-and-white police
beacons.

At last
Calsbeek came over and stood beside Skrolnik with an expression that put Pullet
in mind of a cartoon bulldog
who
has discovered that
bones can fly. “I don’t know how the hell I’m going to report this,” he said.
“I’ve already filed a memorandum saying the guy’s dead. Now I’ve got to file
another one saying he came to life again, and we killed him for a second time.”

Skrolnik
watched the Tengu’s corpse sputter and glow, and the ashes blow away in the
evening wind.

“Shit,” he
said, and limped back to his car, followed by a silent Pullet.

T
he Los Angeles Times carried the headline ADMIRAL slain by ‘dead’
killer–assassin, ‘fatally’ shot by POLICE, REVIVES TO FINISH OFF THWARTED
MURDER mission.

Mack Holt read
the story carefully, sniffing from time to time, and then passed the newspaper back
to Jerry Sennett with a shrug. “I agree with you. It sounds like this Tengu
stuff is all true, and it’s happening here.

But what
am
J supposed to do about it? I cared for Sherry, you know
that. I really cared about her a lot. But it’s not my responsibility, any of
it. I mean, what moral justification can there possibly be for me to attack
some farm somewhere, out at Pacoima, and start shooting up a whole lot of
Japanese I’ve never even met?”

Jerry pointed
to the penultimate paragraph in the news story. “Sgt. Skrolnik revealed that
certain Japanese artifacts, including two samurai swords, had been discovered
close to the scene of the crime. He expressed the opinion that they were
directly linked to the murder of Admiral Thorson, although he was not yet prepared
to say how or why.’’

Mack settled
back on his saggy sofa and crossed his ankles. Olive was sitting beside him in
a yellow UCLA T-shirt and nothing else, idly scratching and stroking at the
blond curls at the back of his neck with her clawlike fingernails.

Jerry said
empthatically, “The only two people the Tengus have tried to kill so far are
Admiral Thorson– who’s dead, at the second attempt–and me. As far as I know,
Admiral Thorson and I were the only two surviving servicemen left in the entire
United States who knew right from the very beginning, what the whole Appomattox
mission was all about. And even / didn’t know everything that was going on
until the A-bomb had actually been dropped. There must be plenty of senior
officers in the Naval Intelligence Command today who have access to the files
on Appomattox; and I’m sure that successive Presidents have been alerted to
what went on. But, as of last week, only two people in the whole damned country
could have known immediately what was happening if they heard on the news about
Japanese killers who were impervious to bullets, and had the strength of five
men put together.
Me,
and Admiral Thorson. And that
must be why they went for us.” Tengu “I still don’t understand,” said Olive,
running a nail around Mack’s earlobe. “Why should they want to kill you or
something which happened such a long time ago? Supposing you did find out that
someone had been making these Tengu-people?
So what?”

“I don’t know,”
said Jerry. “All I can guess is that they’re intending to use the Tengus for
something really spectacular.
A bank robbery, maybe.
Or maybe they want to assassinate the President. The President’s supposed to be
taking a vacation at Rancho Cielo next month, isn’ he?

Maybe it’s some
kind of weird retaliation against American trade restrictions on Japanese cars.
I just don’t have any idea. All I knnow is that they wanted both me and Admiral
Thorson dead, presumably so that we couldn’t tell any tales.”

“Didn’t Crowley
know what was going on?” asked

Mack.

Jerry shook his
head. “He suspected there was more to the Tengu program than building up a team
of bodyguards, but he didn’t have any coherent ideas about what it might be.”

“You believe
him?”

“I don’t think
I have much choice.”

Mack said, “You
really want us to help you break into that place, and rescue your son?”

Jerry pulled a
noncommittal face. “I can’t force you to help me.”

“But that’s
really dangerous, man,” said Olive. “Any one of you could get killed.”

Jerry said,
“It’s a risk I’ve got to take. My son’s in there and I’ve got to get him out. I
can’t see that I have any choice.”

‘‘You won’t be
much good to your son if you’re dead,’’ said Olive.

“No, I won’t,”
Jerry agreed. “But the way Crowley sees it, they’re intending to kill me
anyway, and David, too, no matter what I do.”

“You trust
Crowley?
The same guy that actually kidnapped your son?”

Jerry raised
both hands in a gesture of mute acceptance.

Mack, with his
arm around Olive, shook his head in disbelief–more at the fact that he was
sitting here listening to what Jerry had to say, than at the absurdity of
Japanese samurai possessed by ancient devils. “This whole thing’s insane, you
know. What can you possibly do about it, as a defenseless, untrained, private
citizen? Your best choice is to call the police, and you know it. I mean,
that’s my advice, and you know what / feel about the police.”

“Crowley said
that David wouldn’t stand a chance if I called the police.”

“Kidnappers
always say that,” said Mack dismissively.

“How many
kidnappings have you been involved in?” Jerry demanded.

“Well, none.”

“Let’s take
this particular kidnapping on its own particular merits, then, shall we?” asked
Jerry.

“Crowley is my
only contact; and whether he’s lying to me or not, he’s the only person who’s
suggested a way in which I might conceivably get David back unharmed.”

Mack and Olive
were silent for a while, uncertain of what to say. They saw before them a tired
middle-aged man who had already lived through thirty-eight years of guilt for
annihilating thousands of innocent men, women, and children; a man who secretly
felt that he was solely responsible for turning nuclear theory into nuclear
practice. Until he had said go, the idea of dropping an atomic bomb over a
populated city had been no more than that: an idea. In the Chugoku Sanchi,
alone, under a summer sky more than a third of a century ago, he had
singlehandedly initiated the age of nuclear confrontation, an age which Mack
and Olive took for granted because they had never known anything else, but
which Jerry regarded as a Dark Age of his own making.

Now he was
faced with an equally bitter choice over just one life: that of his only son,
the only child he and Rhoda had conceived together. If Jerry himself were to
die, David would never know from Jerry about all those times when his mother
was young. He would never hear the explanations behind the photographs in
Jerry’s albums–this is the moment when your mother saw a goose chasing a woman
across a barnyard in Massachusetts, that time just before you were born when we
decided to take one last second honeymoon; this is the time a young black man
offered to take our picture overlooking Niagara Falls, and took the best damned
picture of two ordinary people in love that there ever was.

Mack said, “You
really think Crowley’s going to get you a machine gun?”

“He said he’d
try.
An M-60 and a couple of Ingrams.”
Mack slowly
shook his head. “This whole business is crazy.”

At that moment,
Maurice Needs appeared in the bedroom doorway, naked to the waist, scratching
his head and yawning. “Boy, did I sleep
good
,” he
said, flexing muscle after muscle in turn. “Is there anything for breakfast?
Eggs, maybe?”

“Eggs, he
says,” remarked Olive sarcastically. She climbed off the sofa, and stalked
bare-bottomed to the kitchenette, watched with a mixture of pride and jealous
annoyance by Mack. Jerry glanced after her, too, and then turned back to Mack
and smiled.

“She’s some
woman, isn’t she?” asked Maurice.
“Dynamite.
Doesn’t care a two-bit shit for anybody.”

“She loves her
husband,” Mack corrected him. Maurice shrugged, with a big bunching of muscles.
“Well, that’s good. I always did believe in fidelity.”

Jerry stood up
and picked up his coat from the floor. The sleeves of his wrinkled gray shirt
were rolled up, and the brown leather belt around his pants was cracked and
worn. There was something defeated about him, which made Maurice look quickly
over to Mack and frown, as if he were asking a question: Something’s wrong
here, what’s happening?

Jerry said,
“You know that if you don’t help me I’ll try to do this myself.’’

Mack said,
“You’re putting me in a position, aren’t you? You know, deliberately, you’re
putting me in a position.”

“What position?
What? What are you talking about?” asked Maurice.

Mack briefly,
with expletives, explained about the Tengus, Gerard Crowley; and how David had
been kidnapped. He also told about Gerard’s offer of an M-60E1 and two or three
Ingrams.

Maurice made a
face.
“An M-60?
Jesus, that’s a brute. My older
brother used one in ‘Nam. Six hundred rounds a minute. You could cut a guy in
half with one of those.’’

“He’s offered
one,” said Jerry. “He’s agreed to call me at eleven o’clock this morning to
talk about delivery.”

“/’//come with
you,” said Maurice.
“Jesus, what the hell.
It’s better
than bending iron bars in a goddamned circus.”

Olive came into
the room, holding a plate of scrambled eggs with bacon strips. “Do I pamper you
or do I pamper you?” she asked Maurice, setting the plate down on the table.
Jerry couldn’t help noticing the plump black lips of her vulva, shaved smooth
and glossy as a King’s Country plum. He thought: I’m in another age, another
morality, another existence. He felt as if the atom bomb had obliterated for
ever the world of zoot suits and Plymouth Road Kings and “Mairzy Doats,” and
beached him like the hero of some 1940’s radio comedy on an unknown planet. He
thought, my God, that’s what Hiroshima did to me. It suspended me in 1945, a
man in amber, and I don’t think I’ve grown a day older since.