Tengu Read online

  Jerry slung his jacket over his shoulder and climbed up to his front door. “You broke up, huh?” he asked, as he took out his key. “What happened? Was she spoiled by success?”

  “She wasn’t, but I was. I was a would-be actor in those days, too. And I can tell you, it wasn’t easy, parking cars for a living while she was the toast of the town. And it isn’t easy to accept her death. That’s why I came to see you, I guess. You’re her neighbor, after all.”

  “Do you want a drink?”

  “If it’s not imposing on you.”

  Jerry gave him a wry smile. “Nothing imposes on me these days, young man. I have gradually crystallized into a kind of emotional rock formation, upon which nothing can make the slightest impression, let alone impose.”

  Mack, following Jerry into the living room, gave an uncomfortable laugh.

  “Quiet kind of place you’ve got here,” he said. “Quiet, well, that’s the word for it,” nodded Jerry.

  “What’ll you have? There’s Chivas Regal or Chivas Regal.”

  “I’ll have a Chivas Regal,” said Mack, sitting down on the sofa.

  “What happened to Sherry, that was a great shock to us here,” said Jerry. “She was a nice girl.

  Friendly, pretty. Always bouncing and full of life. I wish now that I could have gotten to know her better.”

  “She was somebody special,” said Mack. “Maybe too special.”

  Jerry gave Mack a drink and then walked across to the window. “I don’t think we’re talking about the usual kind of Hollywood nut murder here,” he said. “Not a Charles Manson, or anything like that.”

  Mack said, “She was torn apart, you know. Literally torn apart.”

  “Yes,” agreed Jerry. “But who uses a Sherman tank to crush a peanut?”

  “You’re a military man?” asked Mack guardedly.

  Jerry came away from the window. “Used to be, in the days when it meant anything. Naval intelligence group.”

  “Now you’re... ?” asked Mack, indicating the living room with his glass in his hand.

  ‘‘Now I’m semiretired,’’ Jerry told him. “Living off my investments and a little part-time architectural work. Oh, yes, I used to be an architect, too. But it was the intelligence group that made the big impression on me, made me what I was. You don’t get hardened designing duplexes in Westwood. Not hardened the way I am.”

  In that case, withdraw immediately. I repeat, immediately.

  Mack said, “You think they’ll ever catch him? Not that it matters.”

  Jerry stared at him, unfocused. “Catch him? Well, they might. I don’t know. I always get the feeling that the police are satisfied with anybody who’s prepared to confess, whether he happens to be the real criminal or not.”

  Mack sipped his whiskey, shuddered, and then said, “You’ve got some kind of feeling about this, right? I mean, about what happened to Sherry?” Jerry nodded. “I don’t know why. But I noticed it this morning. There’s something in the air.

  Something tense. I don’t know what it is. I don’t have a clue. But I think it’s tied up with what happened to Sherry. And there’s something else, too.”

  Mack sat and waited for Jerry to say what this “something else” was. A minute, two minutes passed, and in the end, Mack said, “What? What else?”

  “Well... let me try an experiment,” said Jerry. “I don’t know whether you were listening to the radio this morning or not, but the detective who’s handling Sherry’s murder said that a police artist is busy reconstructing the same kind of mask that the killer wore, based on descriptions from witnesses, and that tonight it would be shown on television.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Mack. He didn’t. This morning, he’d been too busy with Olive. Not making love, but arguing about Sherry, arguing about his unwillingness to give himself to Olive while he mourned.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Jerry said quietly, raising one finger. “I’ll show you a mask I brought back from Tokyo after the war; and then you watch television tonight, and if you think the mask they show is similar–maybe not the same, but similar–then you call me. I’ll be watching too.”

  Mack said uneasily, “You’re not pulling my leg about this? I mean, you’re not....”

  “I have a mask that happens to sound like the police description on the radio,” said Jerry.

  “White, expressionless. But that doesn’t mean that I had anything to do with Sherry being murdered. I can promise you, I wasn’t even here at the time. And besides... ”He looked down at his hands. “I’m too weak these days to lift a box of groceries. I’m getting old. And I think I did enough killing in the war to satisfy the most bloodthirsty killer’s most bloodthirsty dreams.”

  Mack was quiet for a long time, watching Jerry suspiciously at first, then more sympathetically.

  The man was old, and deeply upset by what had happened to Sherry, he could see that. He could also see that there were shadows crossing his mind, shadows he would probably prefer to forget.

  We ‘ve locate Jit, sir. No question about it. No question about it. No question about it.

  Mack said, “Sherry once said to me, before she got famous, ‘I think that I’ll love you forever.’

  And I said, ‘What makes you think that?’ and she said, ‘Because everything you feel, you feel forever.’

  Jerry said, “What are you trying to tell me, Mack? Can I call you Mack?”

  Mack said, “I’m trying to tell you that she still loved me when she was dying. You know that?

  When she was dying, she still loved me. And that makes me part of what happened. That makes me responsible.”

  Jerry swilled the whiskey around in his glass, without taking his eyes off this young curly-haired L.A. bum with the raggedy shorts and the tears in his eyes. “You’re crying,” he said baldly.

  “Yes,” said Mack miserably.

  “Well,” said Jerry, “that’s a start.”

  After a while, Jerry left Mack to finish his drink and went down into the cellar. It was dusty and untidy, stacked with tea chests and packing cases and crumpled-up copies of the Los Angeles Examiner for the day he had moved in eight years ago. But once he had shifted two stacks of cord-wood and a broken bicycle, he found the varnished trunk with the rusted iron bands which had followed him from apartment to bungalow to hillside house for nearly thirty-five years. He tugged out the six-inch nail which kept the hasp closed, and opened the lid. Inside, like the multicolored body of a vampire waiting to be revived, lay his remnants of Japan. Kites, fans, Wajima-nuri lacquerware, masks, Arita-yaki ware, paper flowers.

  Mack Holt was sitting on Jerry Sennett’s sagging sofa, thinking about Sherry, and about the day they had hurtled on his motorcycle all the way down to Baja California, Tengu laughing, ridiculous, loving, and high on the best Mexican grass, when he was abruptly confronted by a ghastly eyeless face, as white as death. He spilled his whiskey and said, “Shit!

  You scared me!”

  Jerry laid the mask carefully on the table. “It’s only a mask. I picked it up in Japan after the war.”

  Mack breathed out unsteadily. “Some mask. But what makes you think it’s the same kind of mask that Sherry’s killer was wearing?”

  “I have a feeling about it, that’s all.”

  “A feeling?”

  Jerry stared down at the mask. Its features were blank, apart from a V-shaped black mark which defined the forehead. To anybody who was uninitiated in Japanese demonology, the V looked like a fierce frown. But Jerry knew that it was a representation of the bird’s beak which would usually have protruded from such a demon’s head. The demon was called a Tengu; and it was supposed to be the supernatural reincarnation of a Shinto monk whose ways had become proud and corrupt. It was the most terrible of all Japanese demons: because it knew heaven as well as hell.

  Jerry said, “The Japanese have a phrase: The crow kills by day and by night.’ These days, they usually use it when they’re warning one another to watch out for a p
articularly aggressive business colleague. In fact, most Japanese have forgotten what it meant originally. But in the old days, the very old days, back in the eighth century, it referred exclusively to the Tengus, the devils of Buddha. They had beaks like crows, which gradually developed into fierce jaws; and they weren’t above tearing people to pieces when they felt the urge.”

  Mack eyed the mask suspiciously. “You’re not suggesting that...”

  “No,” said Jerry. “I’m not suggesting anything. It’s just that I have a feeling. The Japanese call it ‘a cold wind.’

  Mack said nothing for a long time. He looked at Jerry, and then back at the mask. “This is some kind of a puton, right?” he asked at last, but his voice betrayed his lack of conviction.

  “It might sound like it,” said Jerry. “I can’t find any way to persuade you that it isn’t. I’m not even sure about it myself. But the police said that a man in a white mask tore Sherry to pieces, and then assaulted and killed a cop on the Hollywood Freeway.”

  He swallowed a mouthful of whiskey, and then said, “I’m probably wrong. When they show the mask on television tonight, we’ll probably find it’s a Casper the Ghost mask from some joke store on Hollywood Boulevard.”

  “But you can feel ‘a cold wind,’ “ said Mack.

  Jerry nodded.

  Mack finished his drink, hesitated for a moment, and then stood up. “I’ll watch the news, and then I’ll call you.”

  “Even if it turns out to be Casper the Ghost?” asked Jerry dryly.

  Mack shook his head. “If it’s Casper the Ghost, then I’ll simply put you down as a stray fruitcake. And that, believe me, will be the most charitable thing I can do.”

  Jerry stood in his doorway watching Mack cross the street in the hazy mid-morning sunshine and climb into a dented green Volkswagen Beetle. The engine started up with a clattering roar and a cloud of blue smoke. Jerry closed the door and went back into the living room. The Tengu mask lay on the table where he had left it, staring eyelessly up at the ceiling.

  “A stray fruitcake, huh?” Jerry repeated.

  No question about it, sir. No question about it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Mr. Esmeralda had learned very early in life that few people are as deeply despised as those who provide a service for a fee, no matter how exclusive their service, or how rarefied their personal hauteur. As a thirteen-year-old boy in Barranquilla, in Colombia, in a crumbling white-stucco mansion enclosed within courtyards and wrought-iron gates, and overshadowed by musty palm trees, he had seen businessmen and entrepreneurs of all persuasions and all nationalities come and go, their suits stained with sweat, seeking assistance and paid favors from his father.

  His father had held court on one of the upper balconies–-Jesus Esmeralda, one-time Caribbean pirate, famous gunrunner, narcotics smuggler, and spiriter-away of hunted men. If you wanted

  -anything to find its way in or out of Colombia–a packing case crawling with poisonous spiders, a selection of priceless emeralds, a Browning machine gun, a professor of social science who had spoken out once too often against the regime–then Jesus Esmeralda was your man.

  But no matter how wealthy he was; in spite of his white Hispano-Suiza and his twenty-two servants; regardless of his talent for procuring faultless cocaine for fashionable parties and tireless young men for Barranquilla’s bored middle-aged ladies, he was never accepted into respectable society. Businessmen who had handed Jesus Esmeralda thousands of dollars in used U.S. currency were unlikely to invite him to dinner. Women who knew that he was living off the fear of their husbands and lovers were scarcely inclined to ask him into their beds. He was a lonely, sardonic man, spasmodically wealthy, occasionally hysterical, troubled by coughing fits that he could control only with desperate difficulty, and by extraordinary sexual compulsions that he couldn’t control at all. It is sufficient to say that as he grew older and more jaded, he became increasingly obsessed with watching women with animals, and that his son’s first glimpse of adult perversion was through the wrought-iron screen of his bedroom window, into the courtyard below, from which the clatter of hoofs and the cries of girls had been disturbing him since ten o’clock. He had seen through the palm trees a small, frisky pony with a long beribboned mane, a gray; and beneath it, naked, on all fours, a young blonde girl of no more than sixteen or seventeen, between whose parted buttocks the pony was thrusting something that looked, to young Esmeralda’s, like a rolled-up red umbrella.

  Mr. Esmeralda had been nine then. What he had seen had appeared to be magical and mysterious, a peculiar myth brought to life in front of his eyes. He had never forgotten it. It had been early evidence of the enchanted degradation of those who perform for money, their utter enslavement to the will of others. It had both repelled and mesmerized him.

  During his schooldays in Colombia, and all through business college in Houston, Texas, Mr.

  Esmeralda had been friendly, helpful, and sociable. But no matter how many favors he did for his pals, he never accepted anything in return, not even a candy bar, nor a sixpack of root beer, nor the loan of a roommate’s T-Bird. The other kids thought him unfailingly trustworthy; and it was on trust that Mr. Esmeralda eventually built his career as a used-car salesman, import-export agent, international entrepreneur, and helper of all those who needed help. He moved from Houston to Cleveland, from Cleveland to Seattle, from Seattle to L.A.

  He never made the mistake of asking any of his clients for money, or even of mentioning money.

  He and his clients remained friends–golfing together, dining together, dating together. The financial side of his business was handled entirely by a pleasant and courteous man called Norris, who had a wonderfully pained and breathy way of pleading with defaulters not to upset Mr.

  Esmeralda, please, he respects and admires you so much.

  Mr. Esmeralda had never married, although two or three Tengu American ladies had been seen entering and leaving his elegant condominium at The Promenade on Hope and First streets. They were the kind of strawberry-blonde pneumatic 1960’s Amazons that Vargas used to airbrush for Playboy–girls whom Gerard Crowley had unkindly described as “a greaser’s idea of Miss Sexy America.”

  On the same morning that Mack Holt visited Jerry Sennett, Mr. Esmeralda was being driven in his blue air-conditioned Lincoln Town Car to a house set back among the trees in Laurel Canyon. His chauffeur was a young Chinese girl he had met in Peking two years ago. He had gone there to arrange for the import of forty-five tons of ballbearings and certain unidentified machine spares, many of which had borne an uncanny resemblance to the disassembled components of M-60 general-purpose machine guns. The girl’s name was Kuan-yin, and although she looked no more than twenty-one or twenty-two, she claimed that she had once chauffeured Chiang Ching, the widow of Chairman Mao, before the downfall of the Gang of Four. She was calm, pretty, and remote, and Mr. Esmeralda particularly liked her in her severe gray jacket and jodhpurs.

  Few of Mr. Esmeralda’s colleagues clearly understood his relationship with Kuan-yin. There were stories that he had helped her to escape from Hangzhou during the Cultural Revolution; but why, or how, Mr. Esmeralda would never explain. There was another, less convincing story that he had found her in a Nevada cathouse called the Bucking Horse Ranch, and that she had nursed him through a coronary. But whatever the turth was (and truth, in Mr. Esmeralda’s life, was rarely relevant, except on bills of lading), there was a bond between them which, for want of an exact word to describe the magnetism of two isolated and complex and in many ways unpleasant souls, could almost be called affection.

  The Lincoln curved up the tree-lined driveway to the front door. A remote-control television camera watched the car suspiciously from its perch in an overhanging spruce. The house was an expensive split-level affair, all triangular rooftops and cedarwood decks, the kind of house that Los Angeles realtors usually describe as “a high-tech home built with old-world craftsmanship,” and then price $125,000 over its value. Mr. Esmerald
a said to Kuan-yin, “Turn around, and then wait for me. Don’t get out of the car. I’ll telephone you if they keep me waiting for very long.”

  In the rearview mirror, Kuan-yin’s eyes nodded a passive acknowledgement.

  Mr. Esmeralda walked up to the house. Another remote-control television camera, suspended from the eaves, observed his climb up the steps to the front door. He ignored it, and used the large brass knocker.

  The door was opened almost instantly. From inside the “tasteful hardwood entryway” came the waft of incense and that other curious smell which always lingered here, and which Mr.

  Esmeralda had never been able to identify. A Japanese stood before him in black silk robes and a black silk facemask decorated with scarlet and gold thread, and beckoned him inside. The door was quietly and quickly closed behind him.

  Mr. Esmeralda had been here three times before, but the strange atmosphere in the house disturbed him just as much today as it had on his previous visits. No electric lights were lit: the only illumination came from small candles placed in flat ceramic dishes of water all the way around the edges of the rooms and corridors. And there was always a faint and distant moaning, almost a.keening noise, as if the summer winds were blowing through an abandoned Koto, the Japanese harp, or as if a woman were mourning her long-dead husband.

  What was even more unsettling, the occupants of the house, of whom Mr. Esmeralda had so far counted eight, were always dressed in black and ilways masked. He had never even seen the face of the man who called himself Kappa, the man he had come to sec. But then, Kappa was scarcely a man. Tengu The Japanese who had opened the door for him said, “You will wait now.”

  “Mr. Esmeralda involuntarily checked his watch. “Is he going to be long? I have a heavy day.”

  ‘‘Kappa pays for your day. If Kappa says wait, then you wait.”

  “Very well,” said Mr. Esmeralda. “Since you put it so persuasively.”

  “You would care for something to drink?”