The Key to Midnight Read online

  “What are you doing here? A dorobo? No. You’re more than just a cheap burglar, aren’t you?”

  The stranger said nothing.

  “It’s the Chelgrin case, isn’t it?”

  “Move.”

  “Who’s your boss?” Alex asked.

  The intruder balled his chunky hands into formidable fists and advanced a single threatening step.

  Alex refused to stand aside.

  The dorobo withdrew a bone-handled switchblade from a jacket pocket. He touched a button on the handle, and faster than the eye could follow, a seven-inch blade popped into sight. “Move.”

  Alex licked his lips. His mouth was dry. While he considered his alternatives—none appealing—he divided his attention between the man’s hard black eyes and the point of the blade.

  Thinking he sensed fear and imminent surrender, the stranger waved the knife and smiled.

  “It’s not going to be that easy,” Alex said.

  “I can break you.”

  At first glance, the intruder seemed soft, out of shape. On closer inspection, however, Alex realized that the guy was iron hard beneath the masking layer of fat. A sumo wrestler had the same look in the early days of training, before attaining his gross physique.

  Brandishing the switchblade again, the intruder said, “Move.”

  “Are you familiar with the English expression ‘Fuck you’?”

  The stranger moved faster than any man Alex had ever seen, as fluid as a dancer in spite of his bulk. Alex clutched the thick wrist of the knife hand, but with the amazing dexterity of a magician, the dorobo tossed the weapon from one hand to the other—and struck. The cold blade sliced smoothly, lightly along the underside of Alex’s left arm, which still tingled from being kicked.

  The stocky intruder stepped back as abruptly as he had attacked. “Gave you just a scratch, Mr. Hunter.”

  The blade had skipped across the flesh: Two wounds glistened, thin and scarlet, the first about three inches long, the other marginally longer. Alex stared at the shallow cuts as if they had opened utterly without cause, miraculous stigmata. Blood oozed down his arm, trickled into his hand, dripped from his fingertips, but it didn’t spurt; no major artery or vein was violated, and the flow was stanchable.

  He was badly shaken by the lightning-swift attack. It had happened so fast that he still hadn’t begun to feel any pain.

  “Won’t require stitches,” the stranger said. “But if you make me cut again... no promises next time.”

  “There won’t be a next time,” Alex said. He found it difficult to admit defeat, but he wasn’t a fool. “You’re too good.”

  The intruder smiled like a malevolent Buddha. “Go across the room. Sit on the couch.”

  Alex did as instructed, cradling his bloodied arm and thinking furiously, hoping to come up with a wonderful trick that would turn defeat into triumph. But he wasn’t a sorcerer. There was nothing he could do.

  The burglar remained in the foyer until Alex was seated. Then he left, slamming the door behind him.

  The instant he was alone, Alex sprinted to the telephone on the desk. He punched the single number for hotel security. He changed his mind, however, and hung up before anyone answered.

  Hotel security would call in the police. He didn’t want the cops involved. Not yet. Maybe never.

  He went to the door and locked the deadbolt. He also braced the door shut by jamming the straight-backed desk chair at an angle under the knob.

  Hugging himself with his injured arm so the blood would soak into his undershirt instead of dripping on the carpet, he went into the bathroom. He shut off the taps just as the water was about to overflow the tub, and he opened the drain.

  The bastard hadn’t been a burglar. No way. He was someone—or worked for someone—who was worried that Alex would uncover the truth about Joanna, someone who wanted the suite searched for evidence that Alex had already made the link between the singer and the long-lost girl.

  The knife wounds were beginning to burn and throb. He hugged himself harder, attempting to stop or slow the bleeding by applying direct pressure to the cuts. The entire front and side of his undershirt were crimson.

  He sat on the edge of the tub.

  Perspiration seeped into the corners of his eyes, making him blink. He wiped his forehead with a washcloth. He was thirsty. He picked up the bottle of Asahi beer and chugged a third of it.

  The knife man was working for people with good connections. International connections. They might even have a man planted in the Chicago office. How else had they managed to put someone on his ass so soon after he had spoken on the phone with Blankenship?

  The tub was half empty. He turned on the cold water. More likely than a plant in Chicago: His hotel phone must be tapped. He had probably been followed since he’d arrived in Kyoto.

  Gingerly he moved his arm, held it away from his chest. Although the wounds continued to bleed freely, they weren’t serious enough to require a doctor’s attention. He hadn’t any desire to explain the injury to anyone other than Joanna.

  The burning-stinging had grown worse, intolerable. He plunged his arm under the cold water that foamed out of the faucet. Relief was instantaneous, and he sat for a couple of minutes, just thinking.

  The first time he’d seen Joanna Rand at the Moonglow, when he’d first suspected that she might be Lisa Chelgrin, he’d figured that she must have engineered her own kidnapping in Jamaica, twelve years ago. He couldn’t imagine why she would have done such a thing, but his years as a detective had taught him that people committed drastic acts for the thinnest and strangest reasons. Sometimes they hurtled off the rails in a simple quest for freedom or new thrills or self-destruction. They sought change for the sake of change, for better or worse.

  After talking to Joanna, however, he’d known she wasn’t one of those reckless types. Besides, it was ludicrous to suppose that she could have planned her own abduction and confused Bonner-Hunter’s best investigators, especially when, at that time, she had been an inexperienced college girl.

  He considered amnesia again, but that was as unsatisfying as the other explanations. As an amnesiac, she might have forgotten every detail of her previous life, but she would not have fabricated and come to believe a completely false set of memories in order to fill the gap, which was precisely what Joanna seemed to have done.

  Okay, she was not consciously deceiving anyone, and she was not an amnesiac, at least not in the classic sense. What possibilities were left?

  He withdrew his arm from the cold water. The flow of blood had been reduced. He wrapped the arm tightly in a towel. Eventually blood would seep through, but as a temporary bandage, the towel was adequate.

  He returned to the drawing room and telephoned the bell captain in the hotel lobby. He asked for a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a bottle of Mercurochrome, a box of gauze pads, a roll of gauze, and adhesive tape. “If the man who brings it is fast, there’ll be an especially generous tip for him.”

  The bell captain said, “If there’s been an accident, we have a house doctor who—”

  “Only a minor accident. No need for a doctor, thank you. Just those items I requested.”

  While he waited for the bandages and antiseptics, Alex made himself presentable. In the bathroom, he stripped out of his blood-drenched undershirt, scrubbed his chest with the washcloth, and combed his hair.

  The worst of the stinging pain in the wounds had subsided to a pounding but tolerable ache. The arm was stiff, as if undergoing a medusan metamorphosis: flesh into stone.

  In the drawing room, he picked up most of the shattered vase and dropped the pieces in the wastebasket. He took the straight-backed chair from under the doorknob and returned it to the desk.

  Blood was beginning to work through the layers of the towel that was wrapped around his arm.

  He sat at the desk to wait for the bellhop, and the room seemed to move slowly around him.

  If he ruled out deception and classic amnesia, he was l
eft with only one credible explanation for Joanna’s condition: brainwashing.

  “Crazy,” he said aloud.

  With drugs, hypnosis, and subliminal reeducation, they could have wiped her mind clean. Absolutely spotless. Actually, he was not a hundred percent certain that such a thing was possible, but he thought it was a good bet. The modern menu of psychological-conditioning and brainwashing techniques was far more extensive than it had been in the Korean or Vietnam wars. In the past ten years there had been truly amazing advances in those areas of research—psychopharmacology, biochemistry, psychosurgery, clinical psychology—that directly and indirectly contributed to the less reputable but nonetheless hotly pursued science of mind control.

  He hoped that something far less severe had been done to Lisa. If the complete eradication of a life-set of memories still eluded modern science, then the girl’s kidnappers might have been able to do no more than repress her original personality. In which case, Lisa might still be buried deep beneath the Joanna cover, missing but not gone forever. She might still be reached, resurrected, and helped to remember the circumstances of her premature burial.

  In either case, the kidnappers had stuffed her full of fake memories. They had provided her with phony identification and turned her loose in Japan with a substantial bankroll that had supposedly come from the settlement of her make-believe father’s estate.

  But for God’s sake, why?

  Alex got to his feet and paced nervously. His legs felt more rubbery with every step.

  Who could have done it to her? Why? And why were they still interested in her?

  He had no idea what the stakes of the game might be. If they thought it was important enough to keep Joanna’s true identity a secret, they might kill him if he was on the verge of proving who she really was. Indeed, if he managed to convince Joanna of the truth, they might even kill her to keep the whole story from being revealed.

  Regardless of the risk, he was determined to have the answers that he wanted. His rooms had been searched, and he had been cut. He owed these people a measure of humiliation and pain.

  14

  West of Kyoto, the last light of day gradually faded like the glow in a bank of dying embers. The city smoldered into evening under an ash-colored sky.

  The streets of the Gion district were crowded. In the bars, clubs, restaurants, and geisha houses, another night of escape from reality had begun.

  On his way to the Moonglow Lounge, immaculately dressed in a charcoal-gray suit, matching vest, pale-gray shirt, and green tie, with a gray topcoat thrown capelike across his shoulders, Alex walked at a tourist’s pace. Although he pretended to be engrossed by the passing scene, he paid scant attention to the whirl of color and activity on all sides. Instead, he was trying to learn if the opposition had put a tail on him. In the busy throng that hurried over the washed-stone pavement, Alex had difficulty detecting any one person who might have been following him. Every time he turned a corner or stopped at a crosswalk, he glanced casually behind, as if taking a second look at some landmark of the Gion, and without appearing to do so, he studied the people in his wake.

  Eventually he grew suspicious of three men, each walking alone, each caught watching him at one point or another, each remaining behind him block after block. The first was a fat man with deeply set eyes, enormous jowls, and a wispy chin beard. His size made him the least likely of the three candidates, because he was highly visible; this was a line of work that favored nondescript men. The second suspect was slender, in his forties, with a narrow, bony face. The third was young, perhaps twenty-five, dressed in blue jeans and a yellow nylon windbreaker; as he walked, he puffed nervously on a cigarette. By the time Alex reached the Moonglow Lounge, he still hadn’t decided which of the three men was tailing him, but he had committed every detail of their faces to memory for future reference.

  Just inside the front door of Moonglow, an easel supported a yard-square posterboard sign. The red-and-black announcement was neatly handprinted, first in Japanese characters and then in English.

  DUE TO ILLNESS JOANNA RAND WILL NOT PERFORM TONIGHT

  THE MOONGLOW ORCHESTRA WILL PROVIDE MUSIC FOR DANCING

  Alex left his topcoat with the hat-check girl and went to the bar for a drink. The restaurant was doing a lot of business, but only six customers were in the lounge. He sat alone at the curved end of the bar and ordered Old Suntory. When the bartender brought the whiskey, Alex said, “I hope Miss Rand’s illness isn’t serious.”

  “Not serious,” the bartender assured him in heavily accented English. “Only sore throat.”

  “Would you please call upstairs and tell her that Alex Hunter is here?”

  “Too sick see anyone,” the man said, nodding and smiling.

  “I’m a friend.”

  “Much too sick.”

  “She’ll talk to me.”

  “Sore throat.”

  “We have an appointment.”

  “So sorry.”

  They went around and around for a while, until the bartender finally surrendered and picked up a phone beside the cash register. As he spoke with Joanna, he glanced repeatedly at Alex. When he hung up and returned to Alex, he said, “Sorry. She say can’t see you.”

  “You must be mistaken. Call her again, please.”

  The bartender was clearly embarrassed for him. “She say don’t know anyone name Alex Hunter.”

  “But she does.”

  The bartender said nothing.

  “We had lunch together,” Alex said.

  The man shrugged.

  “Just this afternoon.”

  A pained smile. And: “So sorry.”

  A customer asked for service at the far end of the bar, and the bartender hurried away with obvious relief.

  Alex stared at his reflection in the bluish bar mirror. He sipped the Old Suntory.

  Softly he said, “What the hell’s going on here?”

  15

  When Alex asked for Mariko Inamura, the bartender was at first no more inclined to cooperate than when he’d been asked to put in a call to Joanna. At last, however, he relented and summoned Mariko on the house phone.

  A few minutes later she entered the lounge through a door marked PRIVATE. She was Joanna’s age and quite lovely. Her thick black hair was held up with ivory pins.

  Alex stood and bowed to her.

  After she returned the bow, they introduced themselves, and she sat on the stool next to his.

  As he sat again, he said, “Mariko-san, I’ve heard many good things about you.”

  “Likewise, Mr. Hunter.” Her English was flawless. She didn’t have the slightest difficulty pronouncing the L sound, which had no equivalent in her native tongue.

  “How’s Joanna?”

  “She has a sore throat.”

  He sipped his whiskey. “Excuse me if I act like a stereotypical American. I don’t mean to be blunt and boorish, but I wonder if that is really the truth—that story about a sore throat.”

  Mariko was silent. She looked away from him, down at her hands.

  Alex said, “Joanna told the bartender she didn’t know anyone named Alex Hunter.”

  Mariko sighed.

  “What’s wrong here, Mariko-san?”

  “She spoke so well of you. She was like a young girl. I began to hope it would be different this time.”

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  Mariko continued to stare at the polished bartop in front of her and said nothing. The Japanese had a highly developed sense of propriety, a complex system of social graces, and a very rigid set of standards concerning the conduct of personal relationships. She was reluctant to talk about her friend, for in doing so, she would not be conducting herself according to those standards.

  “I already know about the bad dream she has every night,” Alex prodded gently.

  Mariko was clearly surprised. “Joanna’s never told anyone about that—except me.”

  “And now me.”

  She glanced at Alex,
and he saw a greater warmth in her coal-colored eyes than he’d seen a minute ago. Nevertheless, to stall, she signaled the bartender and ordered Old Suntory over ice.

  Alex sensed that Mariko was basically conservative and old-fashioned. She couldn’t easily overcome the traditional Japanese respect for other people’s privacy.

  When her drink came, she sipped it slowly, rattled the ice in the glass, and at last said, “If Joanna’s told you about her nightmare, then she’s probably told you as much about herself as she ever tells anyone.”

  “She’s secretive?”

  “Not that, exactly.”

  “Modest?”

  “That’s part of it. But only part. It’s also as if... as if she’s afraid to talk about herself too much.”

  He watched Mariko closely. “Afraid? What do you mean?”

  “I can’t explain it....”

  He waited, aware that she had capitulated. She needed a moment to decide where to begin.

  After another sip of Old Suntory, she said, “What Joanna did to you tonight... pretending not to know you... this isn’t the first time she’s behaved that way.”

  “It doesn’t seem to be her style.”

  “Every time she does it, I’m shocked. It’s out of character. She’s really the sweetest, kindest person. Yet, whenever she begins to feel close to a man, when she begins perhaps to fall in love with him—or he with her—she kills the romance. And she’s never nice about it. A different woman. Almost... mean. Cold.”

  “But I don’t see how that applies to me. We’ve only had one date, an innocent lunch together.”

  Mariko nodded solemnly. “But she’s fallen for you. Fast.”

  “No. You’re wrong about that.”

  “Just before you came on the scene, she was deeply depressed.”

  “She didn’t seem that way to me.”

  “That’s what I mean. You had an instant effect on her. She’s always in bad shape for a few weeks or even months after she drops someone she cares for, but recently she’d reached new lows. She felt so alone, lost. You lifted her spirits overnight.”

  “If she’s really so lonely... why does she keep destroying every relationship?”