The Kaisho (61 page)

“Not a pretty sight, is it?” Lillehammer said. “But I’ve had to pore over these until my eyes hurt.”

Jesus, thought Croaker, but he knew what Lillehammer was up to. He wanted Margarite to get another jolt of what had been perpetrated, just in case her proximity to the feds had begun to change her mind about cooperating.

Margarite seemed not to have heard. She was staring at the evidence as her hands mechanically sifted through each photo. Croaker saw her pick up one of Ginnie Morris—these were photos he hadn’t let her see before—where that weird ladder pattern of cuts, overlaid by the bloody white magpie feather, was the focus of the photographer’s lens. She stood very still for so long it began to worry Lillehammer.

He went to the watercooler, filled a paper cup, set it on the table beside her.

“Perhaps it will be easier if we all sit down,” he said. When they were seated, he drew over a notepad and pencil, then went on, “My colleague has filled me in on the gist of what occurred just before the murders, but I’d like to hear the details directly from you.” He pulled out a pocket cassette recorder. “Do you have any objection to my taping your statement?”

Margarite shook her head.

“Would you mind stating that for the record?”

She did, then began to recite her encounter with the man she knew as Robert. It was very cut-and-dried, without any of the deep emotion she had displayed when she had told Croaker what had happened. To him, her voice, like her actions, had an eerie, monotonal quality, as if she were not quite there. Lillehammer, engrossed in the bizarre events leading up to the murders, apparently failed to notice anything amiss. But then he did not know Margarite as Croaker now did.

When she was finished, Lillehammer glanced at a few notes he had jotted down, asked a string of questions, all of which Margarite answered in the same tone of voice.

When Lillehammer was satisfied, he said, “I’m now going to ask you to do something extraordinarily difficult. In all probability it will be quite dangerous, as well. But from what little we’ve been able to glean on our own and from what you’ve told us here, I’m convinced—as is my colleague—that the only way to catch this exceedingly clever murderer is if we use you for bait.”

“Wait a minute,” Croaker said before Margarite had a chance to answer. “I never agreed to any such insane idea.”

“Uhm.” Lillehammer appeared to give this outburst due consideration. “But that’s not the impression I got from your telephone call.” He tapped the recorder at his elbow. “I taped the conversation. Shall I play it back for the lady?”

“Whatever I may have implied then isn’t relevant now,” Croaker said. “Putting an innocent in certain harm’s way seems to me totally unacceptable.”

Lillehammer looked at him quizzically. “Are you telling me you’ve never used this tactic when you were with the NYPD?”

Croaker risked a quick glance in Margarite’s direction. Her eyes were lowered as she stared at the mass of carnage Lillehammer had left out for her to see, the grisly remnants of her brother and his mistress. Croaker could well imagine the war of emotions going on inside her—repulsion for what Robert was capable of, attraction to what he represented to her new life. He did not envy her.

“I can’t say I never used another human being as bait,” he said at length. “But I always felt uneasy about it, and I always did it with me—and only me—as sentinel.”

“I imagine I should translate for the lady,” Lillehammer said. “A sentinel is the professional who backs up the bait, sees she comes to no harm while the trap snaps shut on the quarry.”

Still, Margarite seemed oblivious to his words.

Lillehammer looked at Croaker. “You’ll admit it is a strategy that has a high percentage of success.”

“When the circumstances were dire enough,” Croaker said grudgingly. “When our backs were to the wall.” He did not care for the position that Lillehammer was putting him in.

Lillehammer spread his hands. “Well?”

“Mortal risk,” Croaker said hotly. “That’s what we’re talking about.”

“Stop it!”

Margarite’s voice, loud and shrill, left them both in astonished silence.

“Stop it, the two of you!” She looked from one to the other. “You’re talking about me as if I weren’t here, as if I were a commodity to be negotiated over.” She stood up abruptly. “I need some fresh air, Lew.”

“I understand,” Croaker said. The two men stood. “Your further involvement should not have been brought up.”

“No. Mr. Lillehammer has made a good point.”

Croaker was stunned. “You’re not seriously considering—”

“I may do it. I told you I’m sure Robert won’t hurt me. But if it happens, it’ll be my decision, not yours or the feds’.”

“Fair enough,” Lillehammer said. “That’s all I can ask of you.” He gave Croaker a quick nod as he pulled open the door for them. He smiled, the scars at the corners of his mouth standing out like graffiti. “Thank you for taking the time, Mrs. DeCamillo.”

In the doorway, she turned, smiling sweetly back at him. “By the way, Mr. Lillehammer, you were wrong about what you said before. You and the others like you had everything to do with my brother’s death. If it weren’t for racist cops, there never would have been a need for Dominic Goldoni; if it weren’t for cops eager to be bought, Dominic Goldoni never would have flourished; if it weren’t for cops looking to make a name for themselves, he never would have died how and when he did.”

When the alarm in Nangi’s ear sounded its shrill warning, he was fast asleep. He opened his eyes into the dead of night. He stirred, fumbling for his cane. He had fallen asleep on the upholstered chair in his living room. As he stood, the sheaf of papers he had been reading fanned out onto the carpet at his feet. He bent down, ignoring the pain in his leg. Facts and figures on Avalon Ltd. were arrayed in neat columns, pie graphs, and fiscal summaries. On the surface, none of it amounted to much.

It had taken a great deal of legwork and favors exchanged just to get this much. Avalon Ltd., as a privately held company, was not obliged to make public any of its business.

He shuffled the papers together and, leaning on the dragon’s head of his cane, stood up. He put the papers aside, went into the front hall, and grabbed his tweed overcoat.

Outside, in the car, he switched on the defroster, watched the rime slowly disappear from his windshield. He had not bothered to wake his driver. The whine in his ear changed pitch, and he pulled out of his driveway. The pitch changed again, and he picked up speed, guided by the miniature receiving device in his ear.

Not that the information he had received was in all ways useless, he reflected as he made a turn into one of Tokyo’s wide nighttime boulevards. If Avalon Ltd. did a lot of business, it nevertheless generated no profit. What business could long afford that kind of balance sheet? Unless it was a shell corporation, set up essentially to funnel capital from one source to another.

Pink and silver neon lights lapped at the sides of his car, lacquered the faces of those pedestrians still about, tourists mainly, peering into windows filled with futuristic electronic gadgets and antique kimonos, seeking to drink in as much of the bewildering metropolis as they could in as short a time as possible. What use had they for sleep?

Nangi thought for a long time as he drove. Given the premise that Avalon Ltd. was not what it was purported to be, the most burning question was not what Avalon Ltd. actually was, but why he was being directed to it. The mysterious man who had claimed to be Vincent Tinh’s brother when he had come to collect Tinh’s corpse had given Avalon Ltd. as his company. Why? Why not give a totally fictitious corporation where any inquiry would lead to a certain dead end. That’s certainly what Nangi would have done in the man’s place. Why hadn’t he?

Faces of teenage models and platinum-haired pop stars, stories high, animatedly sold soft drinks or cosmetics. Their presence, gigantic and extortionate, broke-apart reality, put it back together in a whole new way.

The pitch in his ear changed yet again, and Nangi turned off the boulevard, into a string of streets that became increasingly narrower, darker, meaner. Garbage littered the alleyways, and yellow dogs, conspicuous by their overly prominent ribs, stalked the intimidating shadows in search of offal.

Someone wanted Nangi to link Avalon Ltd. to Tinh’s death, to point him in a certain direction. Was it the right direction or a false lead meant to obscure the true circumstances of Tinh’s murder?

Nangi, his window rolled down, could smell the Sumida River, a bouquet of salt and decay, as of a neighborhood long past its prime, too long buried in the earth. Anonymous concrete houses, thrown up and torn down within a week, were giving way to blank-walled warehouses, somber reptiles slumbering beneath a horned moon. The bizarre machinery of heavy construction crews squatted like sullen beasts in the temporary shelters provided by the ferrous bones of beams and girders.

Too many questions without answers,
Nangi thought,
and I only have one path
—uncertain at best—into this riddle.
The alarm in his ear was fairly shrieking now and he slowed to a crawl. Long before, he had dowsed his headlights, using streetlights and then what ambient glow emanated from the city itself to guide him.

Through a gap in the buildings he saw the Sumida, moonlight defining its puckered skin, dancing on the wavelets set up by bargelike strings plucked on a koto.

Then he was past the gap, and that shimmering view was lost in darkness and the stench of putrefaction. The alarm in his ear was a dull shriek, and he rolled the car to a stop. Farther down the block, he saw an older car’s lights go out. It was parked in front of what strangely appeared to be a private dwelling wedged between two huge warehouses.

As he watched in silence and shadow, Seiko got out of the car, hurried up the stairs, and rapped quickly on the door. It was opened almost immediately by an old woman dressed in traditional kimono. Her dark hair was up, elaborately coiffed, set with long pins. With a quick, furtive glance around, Seiko passed across the threshold, and the door closed behind her.

Nangi pulled the miniature receiver out of his ear and, opening the carved dragon’s head of his cane, dropped it into the hollowed-out interior. The other half of it—the transmitter—was lodged in one of the filigreed lines etched into the silver pillbox Nangi had given Seiko in the car on the way back to the office from Justine’s funeral.

What had made him suspicious of her? It would have been un-Christian of him to doubt her motives simply because she had spent so much time in Vietnam, had had a torrid affair with a Vietnamese equities trader. Just as it would have been un-Christian for Nangi to have succumbed to the Japanese bias against the other, so-called “lesser” Asian cultures, which, in more bellicose days, the Japanese had sought to subjugate.

The truth was this sort of prejudice ran deep within the Japanese psyche. Adherents and critics alike saw this bias as cultural, but Nangi suspected it was more an imperative of being a resource-poor island nation whose inhabitants were terrified of relying for their continued existence on—and therefore under the thumb of—societies on the Asian continent.

It pained Nangi to think that he might harbor un-Christian attitudes even while he understood that these errors affirmed his humanity.

In any event, he had run a check on Seiko’s ex-lover and had pulled from the deep several intriguing nuggets of information. For instance, the man was suspected of running a highly complex scam on the Hang Seng, the Hong Kong stock exchange, that had made his clients tens of millions of dollars and lined his own pockets with a tidy percentage of the profits. These clients, on further investigation, turned out to be a nexus of holding companies that Nangi knew, from his contacts, to be owned by the Yakuza. On another occasion, this Vietnamese had made a killing for clients in several Japanese ministries on a curiously rapid and unexplained downdraft in a favored real estate stock.

Seiko might have been perfectly innocent, unaware of what her lover was up to, but Nangi could not help but wonder whether she was ignorant, as well, of what kind of man he was. It was his experience that women were more astute judges of character than men ever gave them credit for being. Even considering that she might have been momentarily blinded by love, he could not countenance for long the idea that such an obviously whip-smart person could be deaf, dumb, and blind.

And while he was perfectly willing to give Seiko the benefit of the doubt—especially for the benefit of Nicholas—he knew, deep down, that he had put her on a kind of probation, at the end of which he might be forced to act. The homing transmitter had been that act, plucking his suspicion out of the theoretical amber into which he had temporarily consigned it.

Even so, he might have been obliged to shelve his distrust forever had she not overstepped her hand. The work she was doing for the company was inarguably first-rate, and her expertise in Vietnam—and Saigon, in particular—was proving invaluable.

But then she had homed in on Nicholas. Perhaps she could not help herself. She was, Nangi had observed, a highly sexed young woman. But this insensitivity to Justine—and to Nicholas himself, for that matter—spoke of a certain dark current in her personality. Also, the ulterior circumstances again aroused his suspicions. Nicholas was her key into Sato International. The Vietnamese expansion was strictly his idea, and she knew that.

With the illuminating lens of hindsight, Nangi could appreciate just how astute a woman she was. She had sensed Nicholas’s troubles at home, and she had quite willfully played upon that, imprinting herself more and more strongly on his psyche.

And when Nicholas was gone, how smoothly she had segued herself into Nangi’s life. Far from hating her, he found himself filled with admiration. Far too rarely, one found an extraordinary, Machiavellian mind like Seiko’s. The question was what to do with her now that she stood naked before him. Should he banish her or take her like a serpent to his breast?

“Don’t lie to me, Lew,” Margarite said. “Don’t tell me you haven’t been thinking about the possibility of using me to trap Robert since I told you what happened.”