The Key to Midnight (3 page)

The handsome American with the neatly trimmed mustache was present for the third evening in a row. The previous two nights, they had exchanged no more than a dozen words, but Joanna had sensed that they wouldn’t remain strangers. At each performance, he sat at a small table near the stage and watched her so intently that she had to avoid looking at him for fear that she would become distracted and forget the words to a song. After each show, as she mingled with the customers, she knew without looking at him that he was watching her every move. She imagined that she could feel the pressure of his gaze. Although being scrutinized by him was vaguely disturbing, it was also surprisingly pleasant.

When she reached his table, he stood and smiled. Tall, broad-shouldered, he had a European elegance in spite of his daunting size. He wore a three-piece, charcoal-gray Savile Row suit, what appeared to be a hand-tailored Egyptian-cotton shirt, and a pearl-gray tie.

He said, “When you sing ‘These Foolish Things’ or ‘You Turned the Tables on Me,’ I’m reminded of Helen Ward when she sang with Benny Goodman.”

“That’s fifty years ago,” Joanna said. “You’re not old enough to remember Helen Ward.”

“Never saw her perform. But I have all her records, and you’re better than she was.”

“You flatter me too much. You’re a jazz buff?”

“Mostly swing music.”

“So we like the same corner of jazz.”

Looking around at the crowd, he said, “Apparently, so do the Japanese. I was told the Moonglow was the nightclub for transplanted Americans. But ninety percent of your customers are Japanese.”

“It surprises me, but they love the music—even though it comes from an era they otherwise prefer to forget.”

“Swing is the only music I’ve developed a lasting enthusiasm for.” He hesitated. “I’d offer you a cognac, but since you own the place, I don’t suppose I can do that.”

“I’ll buy you one,” she said.

He pulled out a chair for her, and she sat.

A white-jacketed waiter approached and bowed to them.

Joanna said, “Yamada-san, burande wo
ima
omegai,
shimasu.
Rémy Martin.”

“Hai,
hai,
” Yamada said.
“Sugu.
”He hurried toward the bar at the back of the big room.

The American had not taken his eyes off her. “You really do have an extraordinary voice, you know. Better than Martha Tilton, Margaret McCrae, Betty Van—”

“Ella Fitzgerald?”

He appeared to consider the comparison, then said, “Well, she’s really not someone you should be compared to.”

“Oh?”

“I mean, her style is utterly different from yours. It’d be like comparing oranges to apples.”

Joanna laughed at his diplomacy. “So I’m not better than Ella Fitzgerald.”

He smiled. “Hell, no.”

“Good. I’m glad you said that. I was beginning to think you had no standards at all.”

“I have very high standards,” he said quietly.

His dark eyes were instruments of power. His unwavering stare seemed to establish an electrical current between them, sending an extended series of pleasant tremors through her. She felt not only as though he had undressed her with his eyes—men had done as much every night that she’d stepped onto the stage—but as though he had stripped her mind bare as well and had discovered, in one minute, everything worth knowing about her, every private fold of flesh and thought. She’d never before met a man who concentrated on a wom- an with such intensity, as if everyone else on earth had ceased to exist. Again she felt that peculiar combination of uneasiness and pleasure at being the focus of his undivided attention.

When the two snifters of Remy Martin were served, she used the interruption as an excuse to glance away from him. She closed her eyes and sipped the cognac as if to savor it without distraction. In that self-imposed darkness, she realized that while he had been staring into her eyes, he had transmitted some of his own intensity to her. She had lost all awareness of the noisy club around her: the clinking of glasses, the laughter and buzz of conversation, even the music. Now all that clamor returned to her with 
the gradualness of silence reasserting itself in the wake of a tremendous explosion.

Finally she opened her eyes. “I’m at a disadvantage. I don’t know your name.”

“You’re sure you don’t? I’ve felt ... perhaps we’ve met before.”

She frowned. “I’m sure not.”

 
“Maybe it’s just that I wish we’d met sooner. I’m Alex Hunter. From Chicago.”

“You work for an American company here?”

“No. I’m on vacation for a month. I landed in Tokyo eight days ago. I planned on spending two days in Kyoto, but I’ve already been here longer than that. I’ve got three weeks left. Maybe I’ll spend them all in Kyoto and cancel the rest of my schedule.
Anata
no machi
wa
hijo ni
kyomi ga arimatsu.”

“Yes,” she said, “it is an interesting city, the most beautiful in Japan. But the entire country is fascinating, Mr. Hunter.”

“Call me Alex.”

“There’s much to see in these islands, Alex.”

“Maybe I should come back next year and take in all those other places. Right now, everything I could want to see in Japan is here.”

She stared at him, braving those insistent dark eyes, not certain what to think of him. He was quite the male animal, making his intentions known.

Joanna prided herself on her strength, not merely in business but in her emotional life. She seldom wept and never lost her temper. She valued self-control, and she was almost obsessively self-reliant. Always, she preferred to be the dominant partner in her relations with men, to choose when and how a friendship with a man would develop, to be the one who decided when—and if—they would become more than friends. She had her own ideas about the proper, desirable pace of a romance. Ordinarily she wouldn’t have liked a man as direct as Alex Hunter, so she was surprised that she found his stylishly aggressive approach to be appealing.

Nevertheless, she pretended not to see that he was more than casually interested in her. She glanced around as if checking on the waiters and gauging the happiness of her customers, sipped the cognac, and said, “You speak Japanese so well.”

He bowed his head an inch or two.
“Arigato.”

“Do
itashimashite.
”

“Languages are a hobby of mine,” he said. “Like swing music. And good restaurants. Speaking of which, since the Moonglow is open only evenings, do you know a place that serves lunch?”

“In the next block. A lovely little restaurant built around a garden with a fountain. It’s called Mizutani.”

“That sounds perfect. Shall we meet at Mizutani for lunch tomorrow?”

Joanna was startled by the question but even more surprised to hear herself answer without hesitation. “Yes. That would be nice.”

“Noon?”

“Yes. Noon.”

She sensed that whatever happened between her and this unusual man, whether good or bad, would be entirely different from anything she’d experienced before.

Joanna sat straight up in bed, soaked in perspiration, gasping for breath, clawing at the unyielding darkness before she regained control of herself and switched on the nightstand lamp.

She was alone.

She pushed back the covers and got out of bed with an urgency sparked by some deep-seated anxiety that she could not understand. She walked unsteadily to the center of the room and stood there, trembling in fear and confusion.

The air was cool and somehow wrong. She smelled a combination of strong antiseptics that hadn’t been used in that room: ammonia, Lysol, alcohol, a pungent brew of germicidal substances unpleasant enough to make her eyes water. She drew a long breath, then another, but the vapors faded as she attempted to pinpoint their source.

When the stink was gone altogether, she reluctantly admitted that the odors hadn’t actually existed. They were left over from the dream, figments of her imagination.

Or perhaps they were fragments of memory.

Although she had no recollection of ever having been seriously ill or injured, she half believed that once she must have been in a hospital room that had reeked with an abnormally powerful odor of antiseptics. A hospital ... in which something terrible had happened to her, something that was the cause of the repeating nightmare about the man with steel fingers.

Silly. But the dream always left her rattled and irrational.

She went into the bathroom and drew a glass of water from the tap. She returned to the bed, sat on the edge of it, drank the water, and then slipped under the covers once more. After a brief hesitation, she switched off the lamp.

Outside, in the predawn stillness, a bird cried. A large bird, a piercing cry. The flutter of wings. Past the window. Feathers brushing the glass. Then the bird sailed off into the night, its thin screams growing thinner, fainter.

Suddenly, as he sat in bed reading, Alex recalled where and when he’d previously seen the woman. Joanna Rand wasn’t her real name.

He had awakened at six-thirty Wednesday morning in his suite at the Kyoto Hotel. Whether vacationing or working, he was always up early and to bed late, requiring never more than five hours of rest to feel alert and refreshed.

He was grateful for his uncommon metabolism, because he knew that by spending fewer hours in bed, he was at an advantage in any dealings with people who were greater slaves to the mattress than he was. To Alex, who was an overachiever by choice as well as by nature, sleep was a detestable form of slavery, insidious. Each night was a temporary death to be endured but never enjoyed. Time spent in sleep was time wasted, surrendered, stolen. By saving three hours a night, he was gaining eleven hundred hours of waking life each year, eleven hundred hours in which to read books and watch films and make love, more than forty-five “found” days in which to study, observe, learn—and make money.

It was a cliché but also true that time was money. And in Alex Hunter’s philosophy, money was the only sure way to obtain the two most important things in life: independence and dignity, either of which meant immeasurably more to him than did love, sex, friendship, praise, or anything else.

He had been born poor, raised by a pair of hopeless alcoholics to whom the word “dignity” was as empty of meaning as the word “responsibility.” As a child, he had resolved to discover the secret of obtaining wealth, and he’d found it before he had turned twenty: time. The secret of wealth was time. Having learned that lesson, he applied it with fervor. In more than twenty years of judiciously managed time, his net worth had increased from a thousand dollars to more than twelve million. His habit of being late to bed and early to rise, while half at odds with Ben Franklin’s immortal advice, was a major factor in his phenomenal success.

Ordinarily he would begin the day by showering, shaving, and dressing precisely within twenty minutes of waking, but this morning he allowed himself the routine-shattering luxury of reading in bed. He was on vacation, after all.

Now, as he sat propped up by pillows, with a book in his lap, he realized who Joanna Rand really was. While he read, his subconscious mind, loath to squander time, apparently remained occupied with the mystery of Joanna, for although he hadn’t been consciously thinking of her, he suddenly made the connection between her and an important face out of his past.

“Lisa,” he whispered.

He put the book aside.

Lisa. She was twelve years older. A different hairstyle. All the baby fat of a twenty-year-old girl was gone from her face, and she was a mature woman now. But she was still Lisa.

Agitated, he got up, showered, and shaved.

Staring into his own eyes in the bathroom mirror, he said, “Slow down. Maybe the resemblance isn’t as remarkable as you think.”

He hadn’t seen a photograph of Lisa Chelgrin in at least ten years. When he got his hands on a picture, he might discover that Joanna looked like Lisa only to the extent that a robin resembled a bluejay.

He dressed, sat at the writing desk in the suite’s sparsely furnished living room, and tried to convince himself that everyone in the world had a doppelgänger, an unrelated twin. Even if Joanna was a dead ringer for Lisa, the resemblance might be pure chance.

For a while he stared at the telephone on the desk, and finally he said aloud, “Yeah. Only thing is, I never did believe in chance.”

He’d built one of the largest security and private-investigation firms in the United States, and experience had taught him that every apparent coincidence was likely to be the visible tip on an iceberg of truth, with much more below the waterline than above.

He pulled the telephone closer and placed an overseas call through the hotel switchboard. By eight-thirty in the morning, Kyoto time (four-thirty in the afternoon, Chicago time), he got hold of Ted Blankenship, his top man in the home office. “Ted, I want you to go personally to the dead-file room and pull everything we’ve got on Lisa Chelgrin. I want that file in Kyoto as soon as possible. Don’t trust it to an air courier service. Keep it inside the company. Give it to one of our junior field ops who doesn’t have anything better to do, and put him on the first available flight.”

Blankenship chose his words carefully, slowly. “Alex... does this mean the case ... is being ... reactivated?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Is there a chance you’ve found her after all this time?”

“I’m probably chasing shadows. Most likely, nothing will come of it. So don’t talk about this, not even with your wife.”

“Of course.”

“Go to the dead files yourself. Don’t send a secretary. I don’t want any rumors getting started.”

“I understand.”

“And the field operative who brings it shouldn’t know what he’s carrying.”