Chameleon

  Samushi, whom O'Hara nicknamed Sammy, changing the y to an i so it would look Japanese, had also resented O'Hara at first. It seemed, to Sammi, an insult that Tokenrui-san, his own grandfather, would assign his grandson to the fair-haired Kazuo for training into the higaru-dashi. But the young novitiate soon learned that it was an act of love, for O'Hara was not only classically disciplined, he was an excellent teacher. It was O'Hara who discovered that Sammi had remarkable reflexes and who devised a series of moves to best use his speed. It was also O'Hara who devised the grueling exercises that built up Sammi physically so he could deal with the rigors of higaru-dashi, exercises that were so painful that in the early days of training, Sammi would often work the last two or three hours of the day with tears streaming down his face.

  There was, of course, no quitting. To do so would have been to dishonor not only himself and Tokenrui-san but his sister and O'Hara as well. Besides, O'Hara, himself preparing for the mystical journey into the seventh level, conducted a personal daily ritual which was almost crippling in its demands. Sammi's resentment faded, to be replaced first by respect, and then by love. By the time O'Hara became a shichi and Sammi was inducted into the higaru-dashi, they were as brothers.

  When O'Hara left to fulfill his obligation to his father, it was a painful experience for all of them, but it was agony for Tana. She hurt deep inside, the kind of hurt that could not be cried away or beat away or screamed away. It tormented her, and the ache in her chest and her throat stayed with her. She was only fourteen, yet she knew the depth of her feeling was very different from the feeling of deep friendship, the almost family bond, that had grown between O'Hara and her grandfather and brother.

  Tana was in love with O'Hara, yet years passed and she told no one, not even Kimura. So for the next seven years, as she grew into a stunning woman, wise but uncomfortably aloof, she thought about Kazuo every single day. She wanted to forget about him, tried to forget about him, but it was futile. The young men of Kyoto courted her and were rejected. Finally she told Tokenrui-san of her plight.

  "One cannot try to forget, for the trying itself keeps the memory alive," Kimura told her.

  She went to the temples and asked the gods to rid her of her obsession for Kazuo.

  And what did the gods do?

  They sent him back to her.

  Sometimes it was difficult to understand the message of the Tao. So she accepted their gift without understanding it.

  She was twenty-two years old when O'Hara came back. At first he still seemed to think of her as a child. Her aloofness vanished. And one night as he started to tell her about some interesting incident from his days in intelligence, she interrupted him and, with her hands, she said, "Tell me a love story instead."

  O'Hara did not need the wisdom of the Tao to figure that one out.

  But now the dream was threatened. There was no answer in the Tao. Her fate was no longer in her own hands.

  She stood in the doorway to the living room and dried her arm. She still did not see or sense him in the room. O'Hara leaned back on his arms and looked across the candlelit room at her. She was shorter than her brother, and very slender. Her skin was flawless and the color of sand. Her black hair hung almost to her waist. Her brown eyes seemed misty under hooded lids, as they always were in candlelight. Her breasts poked at the short nightgown that hung by thin straps from her shoulders.

  She was delicious.

  He watched her for several minutes and then moved so she would see him. His presence there startled her, for she usually sensed him before she saw him.

  She looked at his smooth face, at his green eyes.

  She spelled out the words with her fingers, moving them in a gentle, constant flow that reminded O'Hara of a dancer's hands.

  "No beard."

  "No."

  Her hand swept across her eyes.

  "No eyes."

  "No."

  "Then it went well?"

  "Yes."

  "Now you are safe."

  "Yes."

  "Does this make you happy?"

  "Yes. No man should feel like a hunted animal."

  "Or woman."

  He bowed slightly. "Or woman."

  She looked away from his face, down at his feet and there were tears in her eyes. Her hands moved very slowly: "Your bath is ready."

  She turned and went back into the tub room. He followed her in and turned her around, facing him. "Has something changed? Is it not our bath?"

  And he kissed her very lightly on the lips, caressing her neck with his fingertips, and moved his hands down her smooth skin and out over her shoulders and slipped the silk gown free and it dropped at her feet and he slipped his arms out of the sleeves of his shirt and quickly pulled it over his head, breaking their kiss for only a second.

  He moved closer to her until the tips of her nipples were touching him. And she moved closer, felt him growing hard against her and his hands slipped around her and he very lightly began stroking her back and she began to move her body under his fingers and he got harder and she moved back slightly and began to caress his thighs and his stomach and his memory tumbled back in time to the night she first came to him: dressed in her mother's red-and-white silk kimono, she had entered his dark room, lit the single candle near his bed, and kneeling beside him, had told him with those wonderously poetic hands that she loved him.

  She had closed his eyes with her fingertips and then traced every muscle in his body with a touch like feathers, humming in that gloriously soft and delightfully off-key voice, and then she had retraced his body with her lips until finally she took him in her mouth without touching him with her fingers, and the memory aroused him even more and he began to rub her buttocks, moving her very subtly closer to him and she rose on her toes and he felt her hair crush against him and he bent his knees and let his penis slide against her and she arched her back slightly so her clitoris was against him and for several minutes they stood together, moving slowly to the rhythm of her humming and then he bent his knees a little more and he felt himself enter her and her wet muscles closed around him and she wrapped first one leg, then the other around his waist and he slid his hand down between their stomachs and found the trigger of her senses and felt it harden as he stroked her, and the humming became a sigh and the sigh became a tiny cry in her throat and she stiffened and she stopped breathing for several seconds and then she thrust herself down on him and cried out and she began to shudder and the response of her passion was so overwhelming that all his senses suddenly seemed to rush out of him and he felt a spasm, and then another, and another, another, another, and he exploded, and his knees began to tremble but he held her close and stayed inside her and slowly went up the steps and got in the tub and the hot water swirled around them and she cried out again and this time her response seemed to renew him and he felt himself growing longer again, growing deep inside her and she moved up and down, sliding him against her and she felt herself building again, she felt almost electrified, lost in time and space, and the waves began again, building, building.

  When it was over, he tried to tell her that he had to go back, had to leave her. But she closed her eyes, for she knew this time the hurts would be harder and the memories would be realities, and this time perhaps the gods would not send him back to her. So she closed her eyes, and that way he could not talk to her. But she spoke to him, a phrase she had practiced many times with Sammi, and although she still was not pleased with the way she said it, it was time.

  "I ruv you, O'Hara," she said, and with her eyes still closed, she laid her wet fingertips against his lips.

  6

  IT WAS A STRANGE SIGHT. No, O'Hara thought, it was beyond strange, it was bizarre.

  O'Hara stood on the deck of the 120-foot yacht as it muttered in the sea a couple of hundred yards offshore. He was wearing blue jeans, a white raw silk shirt and a fur jacket, its collar turned up against the cold off-shore breeze. The heavy field glasses through which he was studying the deserted
beach had been offered to him by the first mate, a lean, immaculate ex-Navy commander in his mid-forties named Carmody.

  As O'Hara's eyes swept the desolate Cape Cod shoreline, a couple emerged from a gorge in the bleak, soaring dunes speckled with sea grass that stood sentinel along the beach. The woman, tall and erect, was wearing a tweed jacket over her shoulders, her brown hair tossed by the heavy wind that sent mist from the roiling surf swirling past them.

  The man beside her was built like a wrestler from the waist up, his biceps bulging, his shoulders and chest enormous, muscles lumped around a neck as thick as a telephone pole. His head was as bald as the beach except for tufts of white hair that caressed his ears. In jarring contrast to his torso, from the waist down he was a wasted human being. His legs were atrophied into spindles, mere twigs, and he walked in a laborious, shifting gait, swinging one leg in front of the other while supporting himself by two bright-red ski poles.

  The man wore dark-blue swimming trunks and an open yellow windbreaker that flapped in the chilly morning air. No shoes. He shuffled painfully past long shadows, cast in the white sand by a sun which had risen only an hour or so earlier, while the woman, ignoring his deformity, kept pace beside him. She stayed with him until he walked into the surf, then she stopped and waited. He waddled into the sea until the water sloshed at his knees; then, balancing himself unsteadily, he tossed the ski poles back toward her, pulled off the jacket and threw it over his shoulder and fell forward into the ocean and began swimming. His powerful arms pulled him through the big breakers and out beyond into clear water and he swam hard, without letting up until he was fifty feet or so from the Jacob's ladder of the yacht. He looked up at the deck through piercing black eyes that glimmered under heavy brows, and treading water with his powerful arms, yelled, "Ahoy there, would that be Lieutenant O'Hara?"

  "Aye, sir," O'Hara yelled back.

  "Good show. Charles Gordon Howe here. It's a pleasure, sir."

  "Thank you. The pleasure's mine. It's a beautiful boat."

  "How's the shoulder?"

  "Fine. Just a little stiff."

  Howe spoke in a strong Boston accent laced with Irish, clipping his words off short, his o's becoming ah's.

  "Good enough. Care to join me, sir? What's the water running there, Mr. Carmody?"

  "Fifty-eight degrees, sir. Fourteen and a half Celsius."

  "Uh ... thanks, anyway," O'Hara said. "I think I'll wait until the shoulder's feeling a little better."

  "And the water's warmer, eh?" Howe laughed, a big, barracks-room laugh. "My beach cottage is right up there on the hill. I move out here every May and stay until September. I'm thirty minutes by helicopter from downtown Boston. Start off every morning with a dip."

  Howe took half a dozen hard strokes to the dock and hoisted himself up to a sitting position, his wasted legs dangling in the cold sea, then, reached up to the Jacob's ladder, his massive arms bulging, and pulled himself, arm over arm, up the ladder by its railing. The mate, Carmody, was waiting for him with an electric wheelchair and a heavy pea jacket. As he reached the top Howe twisted his entire torso and dropped into the chair. He toweled off, slipped on the jacket and draped a wool blanket over his legs. "Welcome aboard, sir," he said and held his hand out to O'Hara. It was like shaking hands with a trash masher.

  The steward, a young man with a pasty complexion, wearing blue bellbottoms and a white starched jacket with a blue dolphin embroidered over one pocket, asked O'Hara, "How do you like your coffee, sir?"

  "Black, please, brandy on the bottom."

  "Aye aye, sir. The usual, Captain?" he asked Howe.

  "Strong tea with a touch of vodka. Takes the edge off, y'know. Breakfast in fifteen minutes, please, Mr. Lomax." Then to O'Hara: "Scrod and scrambled eggs, I believe scrod's a favorite of yours, right, Lieutenant?"

  "Yes, thanks. And I prefer simply O'Hara, if you don't mind. I've been out of the Navy almost six years now."

  "You earned the rank, by God, sir. Be proud of it."

  "I resigned the commission, Mr. Howe."

  "But you left honorably, Lieutenant. I'm a strong believer in titles, sir. Aboard this craft, we honor rank."

  The steward returned with the drinks.

  "This should do until we've had a chance to shower and dress. We can do our talking over breakfast, Lieutenant."

  A brass christening plate beside the hatch that led to the main salon identified the yacht as:THE BLACK HAWK

  Catalina Is., Calif.

  Launched: October 9, 1921

  Owner: Edward L. Doheny

  The robber baron Edward Doheny? O'Hara wondered.

  Of course, stupid, what other Edward Doheny could afford a tub like this?

  A crew of eighteen. Stateroom space for forty. And it could sleep about sixty "in a pinch," whatever the hell Howe might consider "a pinch" to be.

  The dining room, like the rest of the ship, had the look of a museum piece, its brass portholes and lanterns gleaming like golden Inca treasure, the solid mahogany paneling oiled and black with age, the floors daring to be scruffed. The silverware, like everything else aboard, was elegant, old and defied appraisal. The walls were covered with photographs in thin brass frames of Howe with almost everybody imaginable except God. Most of them, which appeared to have been taken in the thirties and forties, showed a much younger, trimmer Howe.

  "I always enjoy reading your stuff, Lieutenant. A very natural style. Not too formal."

  "I write it the way I'd say it. An editor told me that once, and damned if he wasn't right."

  "Good advice. Who was the editor?"

  "Ben Bradlee."

  "Oh ... Well, have a seat, sir."

  Howe took a letter from his jacket and leaned it against the water glass in front of his plate.

  Ah, he likes drama, O'Hara thought. The letter is obviously part of the script. A little mystery with the scrod.

  "I must admit," O'Hara said, "I know you only by reputation. Were you in the Navy?"

  "Measured and fitted and one foot in the door," Howe said. "A week before reporting for duty, some reckless son of a bitch shot me in the spine. A hunting trip down in Georgia. Told me I'd never stand again. The hell with doctors. Three things I have no use for, Lieutenant: doctors, cowards and crooked politicians. And nothing I respect more than a damn good reporter. It's an honor to have you aboard, sir."

  He toasted O'Hara with his coffee mug and took a sip, staring across the brim with his relentless black eyes. O'Hara nodded, raised his mug and stared back. "I assume," he said finally, "that you didn't bring me halfway around the world just to have breakfast with you."

  "A proper assumption. I've heard you're quick to get to the point."

  "Oh?"

  "I've also heard that you're tough, that you're naive, that you're relentless, that you're a pussycat, that you can be difficult, that you're a dream to work with, that you're honest to the bone, and that you're a miserable, lyin', no-good son of a bitch."

  O'Hara laughed. "Well, either you've talked to a lot of folks or one poor slob who can't make up his mind."

  It was Howe's turn to laugh. "Also that you have a sense of humor. Three things that are real, sir: God, human folly and laughter. The first two are beyond our comprehension, so we must do the best we can about the third."

  "I thought John Kennedy said that."

  Howe leaned across the table and winked. "I gave Johnny the line."

  Breakfast came, and when the steward had returned to the galley, Howe said, "You know a gentleman name of Anthony Virgil Falmouth?"

  O'Hara laughed. "I didn't know his middle name was Virgil. There's a certain irony to that."

  "How so?"

  "Well, Virgil was a poet. Tony Falmouth is an assassin. Somehow they just don't equate."

  "An assassin, you say?"

  "One of the best."

  "You know that for a fact?"

  Pause. O'Hara stared at Howe across the table, and finally said, "Yep."

  "I see. And d'y
ou trust him?"

  "Falmouth? Why?"

  "Believe me, I have good reason, Lieutenant. I appreciate the fact you might have some previous loyalties ..."

  O'Hara glanced at the letter and then looked down at his plate, moving things about, absently, with his fork. "There are no loyalties in Falmouth's business," he said finally. "I suppose I trust Tony as much as anyone in the Game."

  "The Game?"

  "The intelligence game."

  "You think of it as a game, then?"

  "It's what they call it. The Game. When you're in it, it's the Game. And he's up to his ass in it. He's a British agent. M.I.6, Her Majesty's Secret Service."

  "Not anymore," Howe said.

  He reached out and handed the letter, somewhat grandly, to O'Hara.

  "Good," O'Hara said, "I was wondering when we were getting around to this."

  It was addressed to Charles Gordon Howe, Esq., WCGH, Channel 6, Boston, Mass. And in the lower right-hand corner, below the address: "For his eyes only." The back had been sealed with blue candle wax. There was no stamp.

  "Falmouth always did have a flair for the dramatic," O'Hara said.

  Howe leaned across the table, his black eyes twinkling, and chuckled. "Did anyone ever call him Foulmouth? I can't help thinking of the reference every time I hear the name."

  O'Hara continued to examine the letter. He said, without looking up, "I don't think anyone's ever said it out loud. It might be a bit reckless, insulting one of the most efficient killing machines on two legs."

  "Oh?" Howe leaned back, and after a moment he added, "Sounds like we're talking about Billy the Kid."

  "Tony Falmouth makes Billy the Kid look like Little Lord Fauntleroy."

  "Oh?" Another pause. "And yet you'd trust him?"

  "I'd trust him as much as any in the Game, which is a long way from saying 'I trust him.' Trust is a negligible word in the Game. They buy it, sell it, trade it, negotiate it."