Tengu Page 8

  The masked man lifted his head, turned, and hit out with a swing of his arm that sent Massey sprawling. Massey knocked his head hard on the concrete, and for a moment he was stunned.

  The masked man climbed to his feet, his clothes bloody and burned from the gunshots. He picked up Russo as if he were a child, and carried him over to his patrol car.

  The masked man gripped Russo by his ankles and swung him around. Russo was choked and only semiconscious, but he was still alive. He could feel the grip on his ankles, and he could feel the world tilting and rushing around him as the man spun him around like a flail. Then, with all of his terrible strength, the man gave Russo a final swing and smashed him face first into the windshield of his police car. Razor-sharp fragments of glass sliced the flesh away from Russo’s cheeks and forehead, and a long sliver stabbed up into the soft skin under his chin and penetrated his tongue.

  Russo couldn’t scream, or cry, or do anything. He was helpless in the grip of his maddened killer. He could only close his eyes and hope that the pain would end.

  The masked man swung him back, out of the shattered windshield, and then around again. He beat him against the police car’s hood, and against the headlights, and against the grille, until the car was splattered with blood and jellyish brains, and Russo was crushed and dead. Through the darkness of his concussion, Massey could hear Russo’s death as a series of soft, hollow thumps.

  The traffic on the freeway passed by and didn’t stop. But this was one time when you couldn’t blame anybody. There was too much blood. Too much horror. And the sight of a mangled policeman with a head that was nothing more than a smashed watermelon, sliding off the hood of his wrecked car, well, that was reason enough to step on the gas pedal and keep going, trembling, until you reached home in Pasadena.

  The masked man turned toward Massey. His breath came in deep, distinct whines. Massey opened his eyes and saw the man standing over him, and he tried to think where his shotgun was, and whether it was even worth struggling. He felt a moment of utter helplessness and fear.

  But then the masked man turned away. Unsteadily, uncertainly, as if the pistol bullet and the two shotgun bullets had hurt him at last. He stood by the side of the freeway, rocking on his heels, and then promptly sat down. After another few seconds, he collapsed.

  Massey tried to stand up. He had managed to lift himself onto all fours when Yoshikazu came around the van; he had been hiding on its other side. Yoshikazu raised a warning finger, instructing Massey to stay where he was. Then, with great difficulty, he gripped the masked man under the arms and began to drag him across the concrete back toward the van.

  Massey watched Yoshikazu for a while. Then he crawled toward his shotgun, picked it up, pumped another round into the chamber, and knelt on the ground, pointing the gun at Yoshikazu’s back.

  “Don’t you make another move,” he said.

  Yoshikazu turned. “I have to put him back in van. He could revive.”

  “You heard me,” said Massey.

  A green Plymouth station wagon slowed down beside the police car, but when the driver saw the blood, and the gun, and Yoshikazu laying the short man down on the concrete, he took off with a shriek of tires.

  Massey said, “Stand up slowly and put your hands on top of your head.”

  Yoshikazu began to raise his hands. But then, quite suddenly, he dropped to the ground and rolled behind the body of the masked man, using him for cover. Massy fired twice. His first bullet hit the short man in the leg, the second ricocheted off the concrete.

  Yoshikazu tugged an automatic out of his windbreaker and fired back. The bullet hit Massey in the side of the head, in an extravagant spray of blood. He reeled on his knees and then toppled face first onto the ground.

  Yoshikazu scrambled to his feet. His teeth were clenched with tension and fear. He humped the bleeding body of the masked man back up to the van and succeeded in dragging him inside. He wedged the doors together, even though they were twisted, and prayed to the gods of fortune that they would hold. Then he ran forward to the open door of the driving cab and climbed in.

  Within fifteen seconds, he was off.

  In the distance, from the Ventura Freeway, came the howl of sirens as the California Highway Patrol came to answer Massey’s backup call. Phil Massey lay on his race on the concrete and watched his own dark blood trickling into the dust. A few feet away, Ed Russo-4ay on his back, his hands stiffly clenched in front of his chest, his face already beaded with flies.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was almost sunset. In his suite at the Los Angeles Bonaventure Hotel, Gerard Crowley was sitting in a Chinese silk bathrobe smoking a long Havana cigar and watching the CBS News. The suite was suffused with dying golden sunlight; on the double bed, naked, Francesca was stretched out asleep, exactly as he had left her. There was a plum-colored love bite on the side of her neck.

  Gerard kept the cigar clenched between his teeth and smoked steadily, as if the cigar were an aqualung, essential to his survival. He always smoked that way. Once he lit a cigar, he puffed it furiously down to a finish and then stubbed it out. He treated his friends and his lovers in the same way. The only exception, ever, had been Evie.

  On the television, a frowning commentator was saying, “... throughout the Tennessee Valley area, and caused widespread damage to homes, shopping centers, and factories. . .”

  Gerard testily blew out smoke. On the rear bumper of his car was a sticker which read God Bless America... She Needs It. That was more than slightly ironic, considering what he was getting into now. But Gerard’s life had always been haunted by religion, and by irony.

  He thought about the pain and the hard work that had finally brought him to this thick-carpeted suite. He thought about Evie. He turned his head and looked at Francesca, at her unconsciously parted thighs, and he thought about her too.

  He should be feeling aggressively confident now. Macho, fit, on top of the world. But for some reason he didn’t fully understand, he felt afraid.

  Maybe his terror of his father still pursued him. His father had been a grocery-store owner in Westville, Virginia–a tall, spare, uncompromising man who had believed in work for its own sake and the severity of the Lord. After school, young Gcrard had stacked shelves and weighed out bags of sugar until nine or ten o’clock at night; and before school in the morning he had bicycled around town and delivered orders. The only free time his father had allowed him was Saturday afternoon, after a whole morning of serving behind the counter.

  Those Saturday afternoons had been golden and precious. Gerard had walked almost every week to the tobacco plantation outside of town, meeting his friend Jay Leveret for hours of games and adventures. They had played the Green Hornet in and out of the long pungent sheds where the tobacco leaves were hanging to cure; and they had run for miles across the fields, under skies that Gerard always remembered as indelibly blue.

  When Saturday afternoon was over, Jay Leveret would return to the big white plantation house, to warmly lit lamps and the bright sound of laughter, while Gerard would trudge home along the dusty twilit road for a silent supper of fatback and beans with his parents, always concluded by a doleful hour of reading from the Bible.

  His first introduction to drink had been a mouthful of surgical spirits in the back of the store.

  His first sexual experience had been with Ada Grant, a cheerful big-breasted woman whose husband had left her to go pick oranges in California, and who gladly took young boys into her high brass bed for three dollars.

  Until he was sixteen, Gerard had been a hick. Rural-minded easygoing, and innocent. But on his sixteenth birthday, his life had been turned upside down. Jay Leveret’s father had written to say that there was a place for him on his tobacco plantation, if he cared for it. But Gerard’s father had sourly refused. Gerard was to work in the store. Never mind if it was hard and unprofitable. To labor without reward was a blessing of the Lord.

  After three miserable weeks of sweeping up, unloading sack
s, and scooping beans, Gerard had had enough. One chilly mid-September dawn had found him thumbing a ride on the highway south. He had been bound for Florida, and eventually for Cuba. He didn’t think about those years of his life very often. Not these days. He talked about them even less. But it was during those years that he had begun to make his money, first by fixing boats on the Florida keys, and later, in the last days of President Batista, by dealing in drugs and girls in Havana.

  In six years, he had grown from a hick to a hard and knowledgeable young wheelerdealer. He had been shot at, stabbed in the left thigh, and beaten up. He had contracted gonorrhea eight times. He had spent days dead drunk in shanty whorehouses on the outskirts of Havana, days which in latex years would wake him up at night, sweating and shaking. He had put his life and his determination on the line, and at the end of it all he had built up Crowley Tobacco into what it was today–a tight-knit, highly profitable corporation with a reputation for tackling unusual and different orders. Not all of those orders were concerned with tobacco. Some of the most successful deals were those Gerard called “capers.”

  Gerard’s father, embittered by his son but well prepared for the Lord, had died of emphysema in 1958. Gerard had attended the funeral, although his mother had refused to speak to him.

  Four years later, she had died, too. Gerard had become an orphan. A wealthy, experience-hardened orphan.

  On the bed, Francesca stretched. Her sex parted like a pink flower. Gerard continued to listen to the news. A busload of old folks had dropped off the edge of Slum-gullion Pass, Colorado. Francesca sat up and pulled at her tangled hair. “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Seven-thirty,” said Gerard, without taking his cigar out of his mouth.

  “I must have fallen asleep.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She yawned. “Do you mind if I call room service and get some Perrier water? I have an unnatural craving for Perrier water these days.”

  “You’re not pregnant, are you?” Gerard asked her.

  She laughed. Her breasts bounced. “Don’t you know the rhyme? There was a little goil, and she had a little coil, right where it mattered most.”

  “I don’t know why you’re laughing,” said Gerard. “I wouldn’t mind if you were pregnant.”

  “You don’t want another child,” she said, although it was more of a question than a statement.

  “No, I don’t. But I still wouldn’t mind if you were pregnant.”

  Francesca stood up. “Are you more chauvinistic than flesh and blood can stand, or am I missing something?”

  “You’re missing something.”

  She leaned over and kissed him on the parting of his dark hair. He smelled of cigars and medicated shampoo. “I could be persuaded to love you,” she said.

  He smiled.

  She walked across the bedroom and picked up a pack of cigarettes from the windowsill. She took one out, lit it, and stood looking out through the nylon net drapes at the sparkling dusky lights of downtown Los Angeles. Gerard watched her appreciatively. She was an unusual girl.

  Not clever, but strong-willed almost to the point of ruthless-ness. And pretty, and unquenchably fierce in bed, and to Gerard that was all that mattered. She appeared so aloof and elegant. She always dressed in pure silk. And yet she would do anything, and take it anywhere. That turned Gerard on.

  She said, as calmly as if she were asking him what he wanted to eat for supper, “Have you decided what you’re going to do about Evie yet?”

  Gerard took out his cigar. “Do?” he asked her. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, she’s not going to let you get away with it.”

  Gerard shrugged. “What can she do? She can only divorce me, and she won’t do that. She’s too insecure; too dependent.”

  “She seemed very upset.”

  “She’ll cool down. She’ll drink the house dry, and then have a damned good weep, and that’ll be it.”

  “Do you want her to cool down?”

  Gerard looked at Francesca closely. She had wide green eyes. Green as glass.

  “Yes,” he said in a measured voice. “Of course I want her to cool down.”

  “So you want to stay with her?”

  “Does it make any difference if I do?”

  “Of course it does. Your home is still with her, instead of with me.”

  Gerard watched her for a while. Then he said: “As far as I’m concerned home is where I spend the most time. You and I see each other all day, we spend two or three nights a week together.

  We go to the theater. We have dinner.”

  “But you belong to her.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” replied Gerard. “Evie belongs to me.”

  Francesca drew on her cigarette. “I don’t really see the distinction. A slaveowner has just as many responsibilities to his slave as his slave has to him. And besides, you still sleep with her.”

  Gerard set his cigar down in the ashtray and stood up. Francesca came nearer, and he rested his hands on her bare shoulders. He was smiling at her, and yet his eyes were so remote and expressionless that she was unable to smile back.

  “You’re jealous,” he said. She wasn’t at all sure if he was joking or not. “No,” she whispered. “I’m just demanding.”

  “Demanding?”

  “I want you. I want your time.”

  He ran his fingers down the length of her naked back. He cupped one cheek of her bottom in his hand, so that his fingertips just touched her in a sensitive place. He kissed her, so lightly that their lips scarcely grazed.

  “Right at the moment, my time is preempted,” he said.

  “I know. By Esmeralda.”

  He nodded. “Esmeralda is just as demanding as you. More demanding, if anything. He seems cute, and old-fashioned, but underneath that bandleader’s clothing he’s a goddamned man-eating alligator.”

  She turned her face away. “He frightens me.”

  “He frightens me, too. But his money’s good.”

  Gcrard thought of Esmeralda, the very first day that Esmeralda had come into his office, and the arrogant way in which the Colombian had carefully tugged up one trouser leg so that he could perch himself on the edge of Gerard’s desk. “I have a proposal for you, Mr. Crowley,”

  Esmeralda had said. “Very unusual, but very profitable.”

  Gerard had eyed Esmeralda coldly. “I’m too busy for any new contracts. I’m sorry.”

  Esmeralda had smiled warmly. “You weren’t too busy last October 24th to run twenty cases of AK-47 Russian machine guns into San Salvador, were you?”

  Gerard had remained hard-faced; but he had been deeply disturbed. He was relying heavily these days on a confidential government contract to supply the rebels in Afghanistan with ammunition for their M-60 machine guns, smuggling them over the Pakistani border in convoys of jeeps, and the very last thing he needed was a public revelation that he had also armed Marxist-Leninist guerrillas in El Salvador.

  “What do you want?” he had asked Esmeralda pointedly. “No screwing around. What do you want?”

  “It’s very simple,” Esmeralda had smiled. “‘I have a Japanese client who is looking for research facilities in California... somewhere private where he can undertake a little medical work.”

  “What kind of medical work? What are you talking about?”

  “Well, it’s not much more than a health farm, really. Perhaps a little bit more than a health farm.

  You see, my client is a physiologist; and he discovered during the Tokyo Olympics that a certain combination of chemicals and anabolic steroids could develop an ordinary athlete into a super athlete... tireless, aggressive, and unstoppable.”

  “I thought anabolic steroids were banned by most athletics associations,” Gerard had interrupted.

  “They are,” Esmeralda had agreed. “Yes, they are. But my client has been clever enough to apply his knowledge to another field, a field of prime concern in the United States, and in many parts of the Middle E
ast, and that is personal security. Using the techniques he developed at the Tokyo Olympics, my client now wishes to develop a stable of bodyguards, superbodyguards, who will be rented out to anybody who needs them. They will be available to protect industrialists, politicians, even senior mafiosi. They will be bodyguards of invincible strength, crushing capabilities. If Reagan had only had one when John Hinckley shot at him, Hinckley would have been torn to tiny shreds! You can call them killer bodyguards, if you like. They will terrify anyone who comes near them.”

  Gcrard had said, “I stopped believing in fairy stories when I was seven years old, Mr.

  Esmeralda.”

  “You think I’m telling you a fairy story? You want some kind of proof?’’

  “I don’t want anything from you. I just want you to leave.”

  ‘‘Look at this,’’ Esmeralda had said, and produced from the inside pocket of his coat a manila envelope. He had opened it, and taken out a 5 x 4 glossy black-and-white print, which he had passed over to Gerard in a hand that trembled ever so slightly.

  Gerard had not looked down at the picture at first: but then he had slowly lowered his eyes and taken in a blurred, overexposed scene of a short, stocky man holding something up over his head. The picture must have been taken in the mountains somewhere: the ground was sloping, and there were conifer trees and rocks. It was only when Gerard had peered closer, though, that he had begun to understand what it was that the stocky man was holding up. It was a deer, or the remains of a deer, which looked as if it had been torn apart like a gory telephone directory. Its guts hung between the man’s outstretched arms, and its head was falling back at a grotesque angle.

  “This could have been staged,” Gerard had said cautiously.

  “Of course it could.” Esmeralda had smiled. “But it was not. That man tore that deer to pieces with his bare hands.”

  Gerard had handed the photograph back and looked at Esmeralda with great suspicion. He had not yet wholly believed. But he had been prepared to listen.