Tengu (49 page)

Jerry said,
“Underneath that frozen exterior, I think a nice guy may be thawing out. Take
care, David. I love you, and I’ll see you later.”

When he got
back to the table, Maurice said, “I’ve been thinking, you know?”

“You’ve been
thinking!” Mack teased him. “Do you mind if I call the networks?”

‘‘No,
seriously,’’ said Maurice. “They’ve got one Tengu left, okay? But even if
there’s only one, the cops don’t have much chance of stopping him, do they?
They don’t have much chance of knocking him off before he does anything really
serious.”

“It took an
atomic bomb to wipe out the first community of Tengus,” agreed Jerry.

“Right,” said
Maurice. “But supposing the Tengu met up with another Tengu–an even stronger
Tengu?”

“Maurice,”
you’re talking through your ass,” said Mack. “If there’s only one Tengu left,
where’s this other Tengu, this even stronger Tengu?”

Mack knew what
Maurice was trying to suggest even before he’d finished speaking, but the idea
of it was so stunning that there was nothing he could do but sit there with his
half-eaten cheeseburger in one hand and his mouth open and wait for Maurice to
point to his own T-shirted chest and say, “Right here. Me. I could be a Tengu,
couldn’t I?”

Jerry said
intently, “Maurice, you don’t even know what you’re suggesting. The only way in
which anybody can open themselves up to being possessed by the Tengu is through
excruciating agony.

That, and all the necessary invocations and rituals.”

“You’ve got
that Japanese woman, don’t you?” asked Maurice.
“That Nancy
Shiranuka.
She’d know all the rituals.”

“Well, I guess
she would, but...”

“But nothing.
Let’s go over there and ask her to do it.”

“Are you
crazy?” Jerry hissed at him. “To turn yourself into a Tengu would mean pain so
great that you wouldn’t even know where you were. Besides, once
you’w been
possessed, it isn’t that easy to become
awpossessed, to be exorcized. Nancy Shiranuka almost died when she was purified
of one of her Japanese demons. And that demon was nothing compared to the
Tengu.

The Tengu is
absolutely the worst demon ever.’’

Maurice put
down his avocado-and-bacon burger, his second. “Listen,” he said quietly, “what
you guys don’t seem to understand is that I’m just a strongman in the circus.
El Krusho, nothing else. Can you imagine what it’s like, being El Krusho? Even
my fucking name’s a joke. I bend steel bars in my teeth, and pick up fat
ladies, one in each hand, and if I accidentally slip a finger up their snatch
when I’m lifting them, they love me forever. I’m nothing, man.
A pile of muscles, a freak show.
If I’m lucky, I’ll get a
different pretty girl every Saturday night, and a $20 bonus to buy myself a
steak dinner at Charlie’s. I run a creaking ‘69 Corvette, and all I own in the
world is three pairs of sneakers and about 108 T-shirts.”

“So?” Mack
challenged him.

“So, I want to
do something exciting, weird,
different
. What we did
yesterday, attacking that ranch–that was a blast. I haven’t done anything like
that in my whole life. Listen, you think I’m afraid of some pain? Have you
tried lifting weights, working out in a gym?

You want to
talk about pain, when you’re lifting 350 kilos of solid iron?”

“Maurice,” said
Jerry, “this is something different. This is spiritual pain, too.’’

“So what are
you going to do?” Maurice demanded. “You’re going to let this Tengu character
run around killing people?
Or what?”

Jerry looked
across the table at Mack, and suddenly he didn’t feel hungry anymore. Mack
shrugged. Maurice was one of those plain people who were impossible to convince
of anything, if they didn’t want to be convinced.

“We don’t have
too much time,” said Jerry.
“A couple of hours, at the most.
That may not be long enough. You may go through a whole lot of pain for
nothing.”

“The sooner we
get started, the better, huh?” said Maurice.

Mack said, “For
Christ’s sake, Maurice. You want to be a martyr or something?”

“I don’t know,”
said El Krusho.
“Maybe.
Anything’s better than being
El Krusho.”

I
n Nancy Shiranuka’s apartment on Alta Loma Road, Maurice Needs
went through the pain and the ritual required
to make
him a Tengu.

Gerard Crowley
and Jerry Sennett tied his wrists and ankles, and then left him in the bedroom
with Nancy. Mack Holt had already started on the Gekkeikan sake, and they
silently joined him, sitting on zabutons with their legs uncomfortably crossed,
trying not to think of the agonies Maurice was voluntarily suffering in the
next room.

Nancy had
reduced the light in the bedroom to a single crimson candle. She was naked,
except for the tight silk ribbon which she wore around her waist to keep her
carved jade harikata in place. Her skin was shiny with perfumed oil, and her
hair was tied tightly back from her forehead.

She sang to him
“The Song of the Lost Warrior’’ and then “The Night Forest.” As she sang, she
began to scratch his chest with steel skewers, gently at first, more irritating
than painful; but then deeper, until his chest and his stomach were scored with
their points, and the blood began to break through the skin in rows of crimson
beads. For the first time, he closed his eyes and gritted his teeth.

There was one
advantage that Nancy Skiranuka had over Doctor Gempaku: she had been possessed
by a demon herself, and she had been a member of the Shrine of the Seven Black
Kami. She knew what the world of the demons felt like. She could sense when she
was getting close to that dark, fluttering, cloud-world of evil beings. She
could summon them by name. She knew what each of them sounded and smelled like:
O Goncho, the wolf-howling bird of Yamahiro; Jinshin Uwo, the beast of
earthquakes; Kappa; and Raiden, the thunder devil. They were stylized and
fanciful beings in Japanese literature and art. Millennia of educated priests
had changed their faces and distorted their legends. But Nancy knew they were
real. She had experienced the ghostly shadows of their malevolence inside her
head. Their ill will had twisted her body, and their corruption had almost
destroyed her.

She chanted the
longest of the devil-summoning rituals of the Shrine of the Seven Black Kami:
the Calling Down. In the next room, Jerry and Gerard and Mack looked at each
other in subdued silence, and poured out another round of Gekkeikan. Whether
this was right or wrong, it was more than they could bear.

Mack
unexpectedly began to recite the 23rd Psalm. Gerard didn’t join in, but he
closed his eyes and lowered his head, and when Mack had finished, he said,
“Amen.” Only Jerry remained stiff and quiet, with his eyes wide open.

Nancy slowly
twisted and dug the skewers into the muscles of El Krusho’s arms and chest.
There was a crackling, tearing sound as she lifted the pectorals away from his
chest. She didn’t have the ritual silver claws that Doctor Gempaku had used,
but she was capable of inflicting sufficient pain to rouse up the Tengu.

“Tengu, come
into your slave,” she chanted. “Tengu, possess your slave. Tengu, O emperor of
all that is violent and corrupt, come into him.” As she chanted, she lifted
herself slightly up and down, so that her heel pushed the jade dildo in and out
of Tier. She closed her eyes in a mixture of ecstasy and agony.

Outside, Gerard
said, “I don’t know why the hell Esmeralda kidnapped my wife and daughters. I
don’t know why the hell he did that.”

Mack said,
“You’ll find out soon enough.”

“Well, I don’t
know whether I will,” said Gerard, patting his pockets in search of cigars
which he knew very well he didn’t have.

In the bedroom,
Nancy leaned over El Krusho’s bleeding chest and slowly sliced the point of a
Japanese cooking knife deep into his upper arm. She had seven knives in all,
representing the Seven Black Kami, and with these she pinned El Krusho’s flesh
to the wooden floor of her apartment. El Krusho twitched and groaned out loud,
but his eyes were closed now, and he was already approaching the first levels
of a deep trance.

Now, with El
Krusho crucified to the floor, Nancy lit incense. The sacred smoke trailed over
him, and perfumed the air with rare and expensive spices, in a way which would
entice a demon.

Her voice
became so high-pitched and strange that Mack, in the next room, raised his head
in bewilderment. “What the hell’s that woman doing in there?”

Another hour
passed. It was well past seven. Outside the apartment, the sun was sinking into
the evening smog of the Pacific shoreline like an angry and sullen god. Jerry
leaned against the window and watched the skyline over downtown Los Angeles
slowly
turn
purple, the color of grape jelly stirred
into cream of wheat. He had telephoned David a half-hour ago, and David was
fine.

Gerard checked
his watch. “If this takes any longer, we’ll be too late,” he said. He turned
the sake flask upside down, but it was empty. “Mack,’’ he said, “
go
take a look in that liquor cabinet.

See if Tokyo
Lil’s got any more sake.”

Jerry shot
Gerard a sharp, critical look. Gerard shrugged and said, “I’m sorry. I’m just
edgy, is all.”

E
va Crowley had never felt so humiliated. Nor had she ever felt so
frightened. Not just for herself, but for her children. After a day’s naked
captivity in Mr. Esmeralda’s apartment, without food or water or sanitary
facilities, hours in which they had alternately wept and talked and argued with
each other, sometimes hysterical, sometimes calm, sometimes vengeful, they had
at last been let out and told to dress themselves under the unblinking
supervision of their black-masked Out guard. They hadn’t argued. The guard had
kept his Uzi machine gun raised at them the whole time they were dressing, and
had then hurried them out of Mr. Esmeralda’s house into his waiting Lincoln
limousine.

“I hope you
have not had too uncomfortable a day,” Mr. Esmeralda had asked Eva smoothly, as
he drove out into the evening traffic. Eva had said nothing. She had been
shaking with rage and fear and embarrassment. Now, as they cruised softly
southward on the San Diego Freeway, past Culver City and Inglewood, she sat
with her face close to the limousine’s tinted window, watching the sun set
beyond the airport, and the red-and-amber lights of the cars overtaking them on
either side. Kathryn silently cried
,
she hadn’t
stopped crying since this afternoon. Kelly tried to comfort her, but she too
was stony-faced with shock.

“Have you ever
been to Kansas?” Mr. Esmeralda asked, turning off the freeway onto Hawthorne
Boulevard, heading directly south through Torrance toward the airport.

“Kansas?” asked
Eva, confused.

Mr. Esmeralda
glanced at her in his rearview mirror and his eyes smiled. “We’re about to take
a little flight.”

He drove up to
the wire airport gate which led onto the tarmac. There was a high-pitched
whistling of executive jets, Learjets and Canadairs, and an oily smell of
aviation fuel on the wind.

The security
guard came out of his hut, and Mr. Esmeralda showed him his pass.

“Mercury Custom
Air Services down there to your left,” he said.

A black van had
drawn up behind Mr. Esmeralda’s limousine. “This is my baggage,” Mr.

Esmeralda
smiled.

“You got a pass
for your baggage? I’m not supposed to allow baggage vehicles on the field
without a pass.”

“Of course,”
said Mr. Esmeralda. “Just go ask the driver.’’

Mr. Esmeralda
waited, his eyes fixed on his rearview mirror, while the security guard walked
back to the van. Eva said, “Carlos, what’s happening? We can’t go to Kansas]
For God’s sake, what’s happening?”

Mr. Esmeralda
smiled. In his mirror, he had seen the flying fist of one of Kappa’s Oni adepts
drop the security guard to the ground. He tugged the Lincoln’s gearshift into
drive and turned left along the perimeter fence.

The Gulfstream
III was waiting for them on its apron, a large executive jet with its lights
flashing and its engines already warming up. As they drew up to the side of the
tarmac, Mr. Esmeralda said to Eva and her girls, “We are going to alight from
the car now, and we are all going to be smiling. You understand me? This is
going to be a happy family flight to Kansas. I have my gun in my pocket, and if
any one of you attempts to make a fool of
herself
,
like shouting or signaling or trying to run away, then I shall instantly shoot
to kill.

Believe me,
this is not a jest.”

A steward from
Mercury Custom Air Services opened the limousine doors for them, and they
stepped out into the warm and breezy evening. “Mr. Esmeralda? Right this way,
please.
This way, ladies.
Fine evening for a flight,
isn’t it? You should have a wonderful view of the city as you take off.’’

“I shall be
just one moment,” said Mr. Esmeralda. The van had now parked behind his
Lincoln, and flashed its lights just once. “I have to speak to my employees
before I leave.”

He took two
steps toward the van, and he knew that it was all going to go wrong. The
arrangements had been for the Tengu, in the company of Kappa’s last three Oni
escorts, to follow Mr. Esmeralda down to the airport for a final briefing,
before driving farther south to Three Arch Bay, and their ultimate
destination–the nuclear-power station. But Mr. Esmeralda had felt in his bones,
right from the very beginning, that the Tengu needed no further instructions,
any more than Kappa’s vicious Onis. And when he heard the rear doors of the van
banging open, and one of the Onis screeching ‘‘ Toral Toral Toral Toral” he
hesitated for only a split second before he turned around and began running
toward the jet, shouting at the Mercury Air representative, “Get this plane off
the ground!
Now!”