The Nicholas Linnear Novels (148 page)

“Anyway, she could always spot a lever and she knew she had a powerful one with Tomkin. She wanted something from him and if he wouldn’t do it, she told him she’d go to the papers with what she had on him. It was S.O.P. with her.

“However, this time I don’t think she really understood the nature of the beast she had by the tail. Tomkin shut up immediately, refusing to get into an argument with her; he saw right away that she was intractable.

“So he called Minck and Minck sent out his hounds to snuff Angela. There was no negotiating, no thinking it over. Whatever Minck and Tomkin were into was far too big.

“Of course, Tomkin had to be there when it went down. Angela was so paranoid she wouldn’t’ve opened the door to Minck’s people. Tomkin was the front man. But once she unlatched the chain, the three of them came in.”

“Was Tomkin actually there when she bought it?” He trembled as he voiced it, knowing how important her answer was to him.

“In the apartment but not in the bedroom. He was at the bar, taking an anesthetic. His hands shook so much he got as much Scotch on the counter as he did in his glass. I had the angle from where I was hiding inside Angela’s clothes closet. I was just coming out of the bathroom when she went to answer the door.” Her eyes were bleak, almost as if they had lost their rich color. “I heard Angela’s high-pitched yelp. It sounded like a dog being whipped.” She shrugged. “I don’t know why, but I ducked into the closet right away.”

“So you were an eyewitness all right.”

“There was nothing mean about what they did to her.” Her voice, like her eyes, had become washed out. Maybe, Croaker thought, it was her way of protecting herself from something no one should see. He took her hand in his, fingers entwined. “They were very…businesslike about what they did to her. It took no time. I remember, just afterwards, being so shocked by that. Such a monstrous thing…it should take a long time to undo life.” Her eyes closed for a moment. Incipient tears glistened along the lashes. “Afterward, they made it look like something else, of course. Not an execution. Then they went into the living room and thoroughly cleaned up after Tomkin. They didn’t find me because I crawled into a secret compartment Angela had built into the back of her closet to store her furs and jewelry; she loved being close to them. I had to curl up into a ball. It was stifling and I couldn’t hear anything. I was terrified that at any moment they’d discover me.

“They didn’t then, but they must’ve known about my relationship with Angela because they found me a week after I flew down to Key West. In the meantime, they’d done their homework. They knew where I was that night; they knew I’d seen it all. Minck’s men are professionals.”

“So I’ve come to learn,” Croaker said distantly. He put both hands on the wheel. So the truth was close…but not close enough. His inner laugh was ironic and bitter. The truth was nothing so clearcut as black and white. Tomkin
hadn’t
killed Angela; he had only set her up. He didn’t order it, didn’t execute that order. He merely went along with it, stood by, a wall away, while it was happening. Guilty as charged, your honor. The voice echoed hollowly in Croaker’s mind. But what was the charge? Not murder in the second degree; not even manslaughter. Instead, Tomkin had been an accessory to murder. It had not been he who had put pressure on the Commissioner to sweep the Didion murder under the police blotter. That had come all the way from Washington, D.C. From Minck himself.

Cloak-and-dagger Minck, Croaker thought bitterly. How many murders could he be held accountable for? Angela Didion’s was just one in a long line. He felt deflated and saddened by the vast gray areas of the world, within one of which he now found himself. It was a bog without form or substance, where direction became hazy before fading out altogether. Where to go now that Angela Didion’s murderer was beyond him? For he knew without doubt that he could never touch Minck on this charge or any other. He was defeated.

Sunshine hit them like a fist on the Manhattan side of the tunnel, bouncing off the hood like a starblaze. Croaker headed right, toward Thirty-fourth Street, where he turned left for several long blocks, then right after the light changed, heading downtown on Second Avenue. The city beckoned them with grimy fingers.

Anger bubbled inside him, turned without his knowing on Alix. Women’s motivations were so opaque to him. He wished to God she had told him all this days before—although what he would have done differently he did not know. They still had to make the trip out of there. Damn it, damn it, damn it!

She touched his arm and he glanced at her. “I’m sorry for what I said before. I know none of this’s your fault.” She ran tanned fingers through her hair. “I couldn’t stand it down there anymore; it was like prison—worse in some ways. At least in prison I imagine you know where you stand. In Key West, surrounded by those two, I didn’t know what to expect next. Would Minck continue to come? Would his feelings fade? Would one of them kill me then?

“It began to feel like there was a balloon inside my head and each day it was being filled with more air. Soon there’d be more balloon than brain and then I wouldn’t be able to think at all.” She gave a little strangled laugh. “Silly, isn’t it?”

“No,” Croaker said softly, “it isn’t.” It was remarkable how she could defuse his rage so utterly. She had only to touch him, to turn those eyes on him, to whisper softly, and all the blackness curled like ash inside him.

She gave a little sigh, as if it had been extremely important that he corroborate her feelings. “I wanted to tell you all of it right away, Lew. It’s important that you believe that.”

“I do,”

Her head was turned sideways toward him. “Not just say it.”

“I don’t say anything idly, Alix.”

She seemed to accept that. “I was in shock; you were such a—oh, I don’t know—a bolt out of the blue.”

“A knight in shining armor.”

It was a joke, but she did not take it that way. “Oh, yes. I wanted to believe that very much. But I was afraid to. It was almost like you were too good to be true. I had been involved with this for so long—all this knowledge inside my head like a time bomb with a hair trigger.

“I felt like I had when I was younger, and, you know, I was the prettiest girl in my class by far—oh, don’t think me big-headed; you only needed a mirror to see it. Boys buzzing around me like bees. At first I reveled in it. What girl wouldn’t?

“But then, as I got to know them, as I went through them one by one, as brief boyfriends, just dating and doing, you know, kid things, I’d always get to a point when I’d suddenly realize why they wanted to date me. They weren’t interested in talking, in getting to know me. They loved being seen with me and, after a time, trying to slip a hand underneath my dress. They were hard all the time; it was the only thing they thought of.

“For a while it made me hate my beauty. It was as if I had thick ankles or a long nose or was flatchested.”

She put her hand on him. “It was the same with you, Lew. Why were you there, I asked myself? What was it you really wanted from me?” She laughed again. “It even occurred to me that Minck had sent you to test me; but I soon realized that was
really
crazy—you killed both his men.”

“Do you care about him?” It wasn’t an idle question; in the future it might become a key bit of knowledge for Croaker to have, like an extra shield or a mace held behind his back. Because he had already come to a decision. There was only one thing left for him to do after all.

“How can I answer that?” Alix said as they pulled up outside an apartment house in the Twenties. “The affair has been taking place in limbo or outer space. I don’t have any signposts to use as reference points.” She turned away. “I wouldn’t’ve gone to bed with him if I hadn’t felt…something. I’m not at all like Angela was. Yet I haven’t a clue what it was I felt. It’s almost as if by having sex with him—by establishing a link that was physical as well as, oh, what should I call it, psychic, I suppose?” She shrugged.

“Not emotional?”

“It’s possible, but I don’t think so. I have some small perspective on it now. I think I felt that by establishing this link with my—well he was my jailor, really, wasn’t he—I’d somehow be less of a prisoner.”

“But it didn’t work out that way.”

The curl of a smile. “Do you really think it could have?”

“No.”

“Of course not. It was stupid of me, really. I never should have trusted someone like that in the first place. But my God, Lew, I was so desperate. It was just crushing me inside. I felt—”

Alix screamed as the explosive bullet burst through the side window, tore off three-quarters of the top of the sedan. Croaker had already been moving, pulling her toward him, covering her upper torso and head with his bulk.

At the same time his gun was drawn. But another shot rocked the car on its shocks, a great fist reaching out from the void, exploding layers of chrome, steel, aluminum, and plastic. Safety glass webbed and pebbled, fluttering down over them as gently as doves’ wings.

Croaker could smell smoke. There was no rear door left on his side, not much top over their heads, either. He leaned forward, making Alix squeal with the pressure, and jerked down the handle of the door on her side. Pushed with the flat of his free hand, rolled her out onto the sidewalk like a sack of potatoes.

He turned off the ignition but the third shot had already hit the car, ripping through metal into the gas tank. There was a dull thud like a dropped bowling ball. Flames licked up, and a curl of oily smoke made him cough.

Croaker turned toward the direction from which the shots were being fired. But he had no vantage point, could move very little, and the smoke was becoming denser. He heard sirens rising and falling, loudening. Coming this way.

He got out the same way Alix had and, taking her hand, began to run. He ignored the entrance to Matty the Mouth’s building as if it had no significance for him.

They hurled down Second Avenue, passing a Police Emergency Squad wagon, a fire truck, and a pair of blue-and-whites, all heading the wrong way up Second. Horns blared, traffic snarled. People stood and stared, then began to drift toward the scene. Within moments a good-sized crowd had formed.

Watching the flow of people, Tanya Vladimova cursed herself for firing prematurely. But she had not known how long they were stopped for. Further, just ten minutes ago her beeper had gone off; it was time for the drop into Japan. She had not been ready for that, not when she was so close to her quarry.

Circumstances had conspired against her; they had manipulated her rather than the other way around. Now, as she dismantled the Attlov-Sonigen .385, stowing it in a compartment beneath the carpeting of her car, she resigned herself. Even had she not been on a time allotment she would not have been able to go after Alix Logan and Lewis Croaker. Her link-up with ARRTS had digested the fingerprints she had lifted in Raleigh, had spat out his name. Too many people, too many cops. More coming, more sirens. Detectives’ unmarked cars spreading the traffic like Moses heading out across the Red Sea.

Tanya turned her ignition and got out of there, heading uptown, through the Midtown Tunnel, out to the Long Island Expressway and Kennedy Airport.

She cleared her mind of what she had not been able to accomplish here. She accelerated into the left lane. Not more than a mile later she was slowed by traffic that seemed to build up out of thin air. She began to go over what she had to do next and in what order she must do it.

There was a pinpoint of light. It was extremely annoying because it kept pricking into his brain in an odd kind of cadence.
Dum-tee-dum-tee-dum-dum.

Otherwise he was surrounded by the milky luminescence of
getsumei no michi.
It should have been wholly opalescent and peaceful. It would have been except for the pinpoint of light.
Dum-tee-dum-tee-dum-dum.

He tried to think of nothing. That, at least, should have been easy. He could not. In vain he reached out for the Void, but each time he sought a clear path to it the pinpoint of light stood directly in his way. He tried to push it aside; he could not. He tried
kiai
; this, too, had no effect. He had no strength left within him because the white pinpoint kept pricking his brain as if with electric shocks. He could not think, could not concentrate, could not center himself. If only he had his
katana
; if only he could remember where he had left
Iss-hōgai.

Dum-tee-dum-tee-dum-DUM.

“Iss-hogai,”
Nicholas murmured, strapped and sweating on Protorov’s wheel.

“What the hell is that?” Protorov wanted to know. “Koten?”

“It means, ‘For life,’” the
sumō
said sullenly. “It sounds to me like a name of a
samurai
’s
katana.
” He was not happy. This process was tiresome. He wanted to be left alone with Nicholas Linnear. Five minutes would do nicely, he thought. “Although what a ninja would be doing with a
samurai
sword is beyond me.”

“It’s his
sword
?” Protorov asked, missing nothing. “Russilov, did you confiscate such a weapon from him?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you
see
such a thing?”

“No, sir.”

Protorov directed himself back to his client. “Nicholas,” he asked in an entirely different tone of voice, “where is your
katana
? Where is
Iss-hōgai
?”

DUM-TEE-DUM-TEE-DUM-DUM.

The pinpoint would not let him go; pincers inside his brain.
“Ro—Rotenburo.”

“That’s not good,” Koten said. “A
samurai
sword is its master’s signature. We don’t want anyone picking it up and asking questions about it.”

Protorov nodded as if he had already thought of that. “Go and get it, Koten,” he said.

“If you bring it back here, there’s a chance he’ll be able to get his hands on it,” the
sumō
warned.

“That won’t matter at all.” Protorov considered options. “Tell me, is he right- or left-handed?”

Koten moved closer to Nicholas, observing the layers of callus along the bottom edge of either hand. “Right, I would say.”