Woman with a Blue Pencil (25 page)

He considered his options.

Clearly, he could never climb up the ladder. Nor could he drop into the ocean and swim to shore. And even if he could do either, how would he get a cab ride back to the Barclay Hotel, a “Jap” soaked from the ocean and bleeding from a gunshot wound? No, she was offering him his only way back to Czernicek. His only chance to make good on the vengeance he'd sworn in that other world, his world.

“I accept your offer,” he said.

She picked up his gun and handed it back to him.

About then, he heard the sound of a motorboat approaching.

Excerpt from chapter fifteen of
The Orchid and the Secret Agent
, a novel by William Thorne

Metropolitan Modern Mysteries, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1945

. . . but, fortunately, Jimmy Park had always been an outstanding swimmer, having won ribbons and medals on his Glendale High School team. He made it to shore, where he took stock of his injury. The bullet had passed clean through his shoulder, missing the brachial artery, so he tore a strip of linen from his soaked shirt, wrapped the strip around his shoulder covering the entrance and exit wounds, and made his way up from the sand to the midway. There, in no time, the wet, disheveled appearance of a bleeding Oriental drew the attention of the police. With his good arm, Jimmy showed them his soggy but still legible special ID, and within moments an ambulance arrived to take him to safety.

The doctor told him he'd been very lucky.

Maybe so, but he didn't feel lucky. Nor did he feel he even deserved good luck, having allowed his verbal parrying with the Orchid to cost him his mission. How many thousands of lives were now jeopardized by her escape? Why hadn't he just put one between her eyes, as Mr. Barratt had instructed? He didn't like to admit that her female wiles had had something to do with it. His nation was at war and a man couldn't afford to be soft, even where women were concerned. Jimmy had never felt so disconsolate, so ashamed.

Admitted to a private hospital room on the fifth floor of County General, where the best gunshot men had cleaned and stabilized his wound, Jimmy passed on the painkilling pills that the nurse offered.

“Tough guy, huh?” said Mr. Barratt, who entered the room just as the nurse was leaving.

“I deserve whatever pain I'm feeling,” Jimmy said listlessly. “It serves to remind me of my failure and to inspire me to give no quarter if I should ever be granted another chance to finish off that sorceress of violence.”

Mr. Barratt laughed. “Quite a speech, Jimmy. But you've got it wrong.”

“What?”

“Well, it's true you missed an opportunity with the Orchid, but it looks likely you got the Phantom, which deals a vicious blow to her organization.”

Jimmy nodded, unimpressed. In the seconds falling backward from the catwalk, just before he'd hit the water, he'd seen the deceptively ordinary-looking Jap go down in a heap, gutshot. From a marksmanship perspective it had been a whale of a shot. But this was no shooting contest, no gentlemen's pastime. The better shot would have been the point-blank bullet for the Orchid.

“The elimination of the Orchid's right-hand man is an important victory for our nation, Jimmy,” Mr. Barratt continued. “Our first clean win in the intelligence war.”

Jimmy merely shrugged. “Maybe if we'd been able to take him alive,” he muttered. “At least then we'd have been able to get some information out of him to help dismantle their wretched organization.”

Mr. Barratt beamed. “We might just have that opportunity.”

“What?” Jimmy asked, sitting up straighter in the hospital bed. The self-recrimination stopped in favor of the renewed enthusiasm of a patriot.

Mr. Barratt turned and started for the wooden wardrobe in a corner of the private room. He opened the doors and removed Jimmy's still-damp suit from its hanger, tossing it onto the hospital bed. “Get dressed,” he instructed.

Jimmy picked up his suit jacket, which had a hole through the front and back of the left shoulder.

“I didn't have time to stop by your place for a change of clothes,” Mr. Barratt said. “A little dampness won't kill you.”

Jimmy slid his legs around and stood up slightly unsteadily from the bed. “What's happened?” he asked, tucking his hospital gown like a long, wrinkled shirt inside his moist trousers.

“We've intercepted a call from a downtown hotel reporting that a gut-shot Jap stumbled into their lobby a few minutes ago, brandishing a handgun. He made his way upstairs to a room rented earlier to a Mr. Henry Czernicek, a name that in the past fifteen minutes I've learned via hotline from our people in DC does not exist on any tax records, census, or immigration reports.”

“So the police are moving in?” Jimmy asked, sitting on the chair in the corner of the room to put his wet socks on his feet, his Florsheims at arm's reach.

“No.”

“What? Why not? We can't let him get away. It's got to be the Phantom.”

Mr. Barratt nodded. “You've answered your own question, Jimmy. We don't want the police getting to the Phantom first. If so, he'll be booked, jailed, arraigned, tried, convicted, executed, etcetera. From a law-enforcement standpoint it'll go fine. But from an intelligence-gathering viewpoint, it's inefficient. You understand that there are methods of persuasion that
we
might execute that are unavailable to ordinary law enforcement and judicial agencies, right?”

Jimmy understood. He finished tying his shoes. (Not so easy with a bum shoulder.) He stood. “Can you help me with this jacket?” he asked, indicating his wounded left shoulder.

Mr. Barratt nodded and helped his agent into the dank suit jacket. “I'm only too happy to be your valet, Mr. Park,” he said kiddingly. “Just so long as you don't call me your ‘houseboy.'”

“You're going to have to be my chauffeur, too,” Jimmy added.

“Let's go.”

“Wait,” Jimmy said. “I don't have a gun.”

“You shoot with your right hand, right?”

“Yeah, the wound is no problem.”

Mr. Barratt reached inside his suit coat and withdrew from his own shoulder holster his standard-issue weapon, which he handed to Jimmy. “You're a better shot than I am.”

Jimmy didn't bother with false modesty. There wasn't time.

He just took the gun.

Turning to leave, the two men were stopped by a skinny, five-foot-tall nurse standing in the doorway.

“He can't go,” she said. “He's not discharged.”

Mr. Barratt showed her his ID. “Maybe just this once you could make an exception, ma'am.”

THE REVISED—CHAPTER NINE

Two worlds, like audiences, disperse
And leave the soul alone.

—Emily Dickinson

Sumida's squeaking left shoe was heavy with blood, which still flowed down his side. The Florsheim left a print with every step he took along the fifth-floor hallway from the elevator to Czernicek's hotel room. If he had entertained any notion of evading pursuit—from the police, pro-Japanese Fifth Columnists, Federal agents, whomever—the bloody footprints would have given him away. But he harbored no such notions. He'd already lost too much blood for pulp fiction fantasies of escape. His ears rang, his eyesight wavered, his breaths came fast and short, his body temperature felt arctic—he knew he hadn't much time. Besides, he'd wearied of hiding from authorities (the absurd night spent sleeping in the stolen Chrysler Royale . . .), just as he'd wearied of being in this world that was not his any longer.

He didn't require much time to do what was left for him to do anyway.

He opened the door to the hotel room and, hoping to make a dignified entrance, stumbled inside.

Czernicek was where Sumida had left him, still gagged and handcuffed to the radiator. The police detective had regained consciousness, though he looked nearly as unsteady sitting upright as Sumida felt walking. Nonetheless, Czernicek's eyes burned with fury, his face streaked with blood from the kick Sumida had administered before he'd left for the Pike—a lifetime ago.

Sumida pulled the hand towel from Czernicek's mouth.

The police detective spit at Sumida, but missed.

Sumida paid the gesture no heed, managing to make it to a chair that faced his quarry from six-feet distant. He took the gun from the waistband of his trousers and aimed it at Czernicek's heart.

“You're going to shoot an LAPD detective, Sumida?”

Sumida laughed. The notion of his being kept from doing what needed to be done merely because of a man's job title struck him as hilarious.

The problem was that it hurt too much to laugh.

So he stopped laughing.

“You're making a big mistake,” Czernicek said.

“It wasn't her,” Sumida said.

“Let me go, you son of a bitch, or I swear you'll pay,” Czernicek snapped.

“What are you going to do, kill me?” Sumida asked, again having to fight off laughter.

“I'll tear you a new asshole.”

“I quiver in fear, Czernicek.”

“All I got to do is yell for help and the hotel dick'll be here in . . .”

“You raise your voice and I'll give you a bullet all the sooner,” Sumida interrupted.

Sumida watched Czernicek's eyes move from the bloody shoe up his left side, which was soaked all the way to the rib cage. Sumida could smell the reek of his own blood. But the cop pretended not to notice, perhaps hoping Sumida would lose consciousness before taking his revenge. Sumida would allow no such moment for hope to alight in Czernicek's blue eyes. “Yeah, Mr. LAPD detective, I'm shot, so very shortly we're going to be dying here together.”

The cop said nothing.

“Did you hear me tell you that the woman wasn't Kyoko?” Sumida asked.

“But I saw the picture,” Czernicek answered, softening his tone to one of rationality—a truly desperate maneuver for a man of his ilk.

Sumida shrugged. “A kind of twin, I guess. I don't know. But she wasn't my wife. More like her opposite, actually. Tough as nails. Queen bitch. But she did me a good turn after I saved her life.”

“What'd she do?”

“She got me here in time to finish you.”

“But it had to be your Kyoko,” Czernicek insisted. “Maybe she's changed a little. But it had to be her!”

Sumida sighed. “Let's face it, Czernicek, when you kill a woman she doesn't come back.”

“But with so many strange things going on lately . . .” Czernicek started.

“She never comes back,” Sumida interrupted, cocking the gun.

“How can you make a moral decision in a world you don't even understand, Sumida?”

“Understand?” Sumida felt the life slipping from him, his heartbeat wavering, his head pounding, his vision going . . . “I didn't understand the world even
before
last night. I don't think the world is ever something you can understand, even when it seems ordinary. So all you can do is try to figure out what you've been put here to do. And then do it.”

“And what were you put here to do, Sumida? Commit murder? Kill a bound man in a hotel room?”

“Avenge the killing of the woman who loved me.”

“She
didn't
love you, Sumida. Get it straight and you'll get it right!”

Sumida hesitated. “Okay, I'll take your word for it, Czernicek. I'll amend what I said. I'm here to avenge the killing of the woman who didn't love me.” Sumida extended the gun and slipped his finger onto the trigger. “The point is I loved her.”

“Please don't, Sam,” Czernicek begged. “We're partners in this goddamn crazy world!”

Sumida shook his head. “You'll kill again if I don't take care of business.” By nature, Sumida was no executioner. He was hardly even a man of action. But this was a duty. “
Shikata ga nai
,” he muttered.
This cannot be helped
.

“What the hell's that mean?” Czernicek demanded.

Sumida didn't answer. With the last of his strength, he held his arm ramrod straight, keeping the gun pointed at his target. He pulled the trigger. The last thing he felt before losing consciousness was the weapon's kick, the last sound its explosive discharge.

THE END

Begun: Camp Shelby, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, July 5, 1943

Completed: Cecina, Italy, July 3, 1944