“A stray fruitcake, huh?”
Jerry repeated.
No question
about it, sir. No question about it.
M
r. 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. Esmeralda 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?”
“A glass of
water would be admirable.”
“So it shall
be. Now please wait.”
While the
Japanese went to bring his water, Mr. Esmeralda wandered impatiently into the
large empty area which, before this house had been taken over by Kappa and his
entourage, must have been the “generous, oversized family room.” Now there was
nothing here but bare floor boards and scores of flickering candles. The walls
were white and bare, except for three or four sheets of handmade paper on which
were written thousands of intricate Japanese characters.
Mr.
Esmeralda went
over and peered at them, as he had peered at them before, and wished he could
read Japanese. For all he knew, they were nothing more threatening than
Tokyo-Kobe bullet-train timetables.
Upstairs, or
next door, or wherever it came from, he could hear that distant moaning sound,
and for a moment he held his breath and frowned and listened as hard as he
could, trying to make out once and for all what it actually was.
At last, the
Japanese
came
padding back with his glass of water.
Mr. Esmeralda drank a little of it and then handed the glass back. “Tepid,” he
said. The Japanese didn’t answer.
Then Mr.
Esmeralda
asked, “Is Kappa going to be very much longer? I am not particularly good at
waiting. It doesn’t suit my temperament.” Still the Japanese didn’t answer.
“You
know,
temperament?” repeated Mr. Esmeralda. “I am
what they call a man of little patience. I have a short fuse.”
A gong rang; a
sound more felt than heard. The Japanese said, “Kappa will see you now. Please
follow me.”
Mr. Esmeralda
took out his handkerchief and dabbed at the back of his neck. “Thank God for
that.” He glanced up at the ceiling and crossed himself quickly. “Thank you,”
he muttered.
Perhaps the
house in Laurel Canyon disturbed him so much because he knew that he was going
to have to confront Kappa again. Kappa still gave him occasional nightmares,
even though he had seen beggars all over the Middle East, and lepers in Africa,
and the deformed victims of mercury pollution at Minamata. Mr. Esmeralda liked
to think of himself as a cosmopolitan, a man who could slip comfortably onto a
stool at the Oak Bar of the Plaza one week and be greeted by the barman by
name; and then be welcomed the next week at a small brothel in Marseilles with
the same affability. He couldn’t think, offhand, of a country he hadn’t
visited. He couldn’t think of a major international gangster whose hand he
hadn’t shaken, and whose assistance he couldn’t rely on.
But he had
never met anything like Kappa; and he nightly prayed to the Virgin Mary that he
would never meet anything like Kappa again.
Mr. Esmeralda
had become involved with Kappa by accident, on board a ferry that was taking
passengers from Tokushima to Wakayama, across the Kii-Suido. The ferry had been
elegant, white-painted, and old, with two large paddles which left curling
patterns of foam on the silver-gray water. It had been a strange misty
afternoon, with the sun as red behind the mist as a Japanese flag, a supernatural
scarlet orb. Mr. Esmeralda had been talking to his people in Kochi about
heroin. They had left him unsatisfied: there had been a great deal of
ceremonial tea-drinking, chanoyu, but very little in the way of firm delivery
dates. Mr. Esmeralda was leaning on the rail of the ferry feeling irritated and
tired. He often found that the so-called superefficiency of the Japanese was
nothing more than an impressive display of Oriental ritual.
He enjoyed
Tengu subtlety in his dealings, but the Kochi people were so suble that they
practically disappeared up their own inscrutability.
A voice had
said close beside him, “You are Mr. Esmerarda?”
Mr. Esmeralda
had shifted sideways to see who was talking to him. Anybody who knew his name
was probably police or customs, and he didn’t particularly want to speak to
either. But, in fact, it had been
a young
Japanese in
a khaki windbreaker and thin beige slacks, unexceptional-looking, the kind of
Toyko student type you could have lost in a crowd in Nihonbashi just by
blinking. “Mr. Esmerarda?” the student had repeated. “What do you want?
You had better
know that I am very selective when it comes to shipboard romances.”
The Japanese
student had stared at him unblinkingly. “You must prease accompany me.”
“I am here. I
am listening. What more do you want?”
“You must
accompany me downstairs.
Kappa wishes to
speak with you.”
“Kappa?
Who’s Kappa?”
The Japanese
student had said, “You may have seen him carried on board.”
Mr, Esmeralda
had said quietly, “You mean the...” and the Japanese student had nodded.
Nobody could
have failed to notice the long black Toyota limousine that had drawn up to the
dock just before the ferry was due to leave, and the extraordinary ensemble
which had alighted from it and hurried to the gangway. Four men, hooded and
gowned in black, bearing between them a kind of elaborate wickerwork palanquin,
in which a diminutive figure nodded and swayed, completely swathed in a white
sheet.
When Mr.
Esmeralda had seen them come on board, he had crossed himself. Another
passenger,
an elderly
Japanese, had actually
disembarked, in spite of the arguments of his relatives, and refused to travel
on the ferry in the company of demons. The palanquin had quickly been taken
below and the lacquered cabin doors shut behind it, and the ferry had set off
on its spectral journey through the mist of the Kii-Suido. But many of the
passengers had appeared to be unsettled, and there had been a lot of forced
laughter and whiskey-drinking.