“Not much. Not really.”
“During World Wars One and Two, nearly all our POWs had been stubborn in captivity, difficult to contain. They conspired against their keepers, resisted, engineered elaborate escapes. Starting with the Korean War, all that changed. With brutal physical torture and sophisticated brainwashing, by applying continuous psychological stress, the Communists broke their spirit. Not many attempted to escape, and those who actually got away can just about be counted on my fingers. It was the same in Vietnam. If anything, the torture our POWs were subjected to was worse than in Korea. But Chelgrin was one of the few who refused to be passive, cooperative. After fourteen months in captivity, he escaped, made it back to friendly territory. Time devoted a cover story to him, and he wrote a successful book about his adventures. He ran for office a few years later, and he milked his service record for every vote it was worth.”
“I’ve never heard of him,” Joanna insisted.
As the taxi moved through the heavy traffic on Horikawa Street, Alex said, “When Tom Chelgrin got out of the army, he met a girl, got married, and fathered a child. His mother had died while he was in that North Vietnamese prison camp, and he’d inherited seventy-five or eighty thousand dollars after taxes, which was a good chunk in those pre-inflation days. He put that money with his book earnings and whatever he could borrow, and he purchased a Honda dealership. Soon it seemed like half the people in the country were driving Japanese cars, especially Hondas. Tom added three more dealerships, got into other businesses, and became a rich man. He did a lot of charity work, earned a reputation as a humanitarian in his community, and finally campaigned for a congressional seat. He lost the first time, but came back two years later and won. Won again. And then moved on to the U.S. Senate, where he’s been since—”
Joanna interrupted him. “What about the name you used, what you called me?”
“Lisa Chelgrin.”
“How’s she fit in?”
“She was Thomas Chelgrin’s only child.”
Joanna’s eyes widened. Again, Alex was unable to detect any deception in her response. With genuine surprise, she said, “You think I’m this man’s daughter?”
“I believe there’s a chance you might be.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Am I?”
“I’m beginning to wonder,” she said.
“Considering the—”
“I know whose daughter I am, for God’s sake.”
“Do you?”
“Of course. Robert and Elizabeth Rand were my parents.”
“And they died in an accident near Brighton,” he said.
“Yes. A long time ago.”
“And you’ve no living relatives.”
“So?”
“Convenient, don’t you think?”
“Why would I lie to you?” she asked, not just baffled by his peculiar conviction that she was living under a false identity but increasingly angered by it. “I’m not a liar.”
The driver clearly sensed the antagonism in her voice. He glanced at them in the rearview mirror, and then he looked straight ahead, humming a bit louder than the music on the Sony Discman, too polite to eavesdrop even when he didn’t understand the language that they were speaking.
“I’m not calling you a liar,” Alex said quietly.
“That’s sure what I’m hearing.”
“You’re overreacting.”
“The hell I am. This is weird.”
“I agree. It is weird. Your repeating nightmare, your reaction to the Korean with one hand, your resemblance to Lisa Chelgrin. It’s definitely weird.”
She didn’t reply, just glared at him.
“Maybe you’re afraid of what I’m leading up to.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” she said curtly.
“Then what are you afraid of?”
“What are you accusing me of?”
“Joanna, I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m only—”
“I feel like you are accusing me, and I don’t like it. I don’t understand it, and I don’t like it. All right?”
She looked away from him and out the side window at the cars and cyclists on Shijo Street.
For a moment Alex was silent, but then he continued as if her outburst had never occurred. “One night in July, more than twelve years ago, the summer after Lisa Chelgrin’s junior year at Georgetown University, she vanished from her father’s vacation villa in Jamaica. Someone got into her bedroom through an unlocked window. Although there were signs of a struggle, even a few smears of her blood on the bedclothes and one windowsill, no one in the house heard her scream. Clearly, she’d been kidnapped, but no ransom demand was received. The police believed she’d been abducted and murdered. A sex maniac, they said. On the other hand, they weren’t able to find her body, so they couldn’t just assume she was dead. At least not right away, not until they went through the motions of an exhaustive search. After three weeks, Chelgrin lost all confidence in the island police—which he should have done the second day he had to deal with them. Because he was from the Chicago area, because a friend of his had used my company and recommended me, Chelgrin asked me to fly to Jamaica to look for Lisa—even though Bonner-Hunter was still a relatively small company back then and I was just turning thirty. My people worked on the case for ten months before Tom Chelgrin gave up. We used eight damned good men full time and hired as many Jamaicans to do a lot of footwork. It was an expensive deal for the senator, but he didn’t care. Still... it wouldn’t have mattered if we’d had ten thousand men on the case. It was a perfect crime. It’s one of only two major investigations that we’ve failed to wrap up successfully since I took over the business.”
The taxi swung around another comer. The Moonglow Lounge stood half a block ahead.
Joanna finally spoke again, although she still wouldn’t look at him. “But why do you think I’m Lisa Chelgrin?”
“Lots of reasons. For one thing, you’re the same age she’d be if she were still alive. More important, you’re a dead ringer for her, just twelve years older.”
Frowning, she looked at him at last. “Do you have a photograph of her?”
“Not on me. But I’ll get one.”
The taxi slowed, pulled to the curb, and stopped in front of the Moonglow Lounge. The driver switched off the meter, opened his door, and got out.
“When you have a photo,” Joanna said, “I’d like to see it.” She shook hands with him as if they’d experienced nothing more together than a pleasant business lunch. “Thanks for lunch. Sorry I spoiled the sightseeing.”
Alex realized that she was dismissing him. “Can’t we have a drink and—”
“I don’t feel well,” she said.
The cabdriver opened her door, and she started to get out.
Alex held on to her hand, forcing her to look at him again. “Joanna, we have a lot to talk about. We—”
“Maybe later.”
“Aren’t you still curious, for God’s sake?”
“Not nearly as curious as I am ill. Queasy stomach, headache. It must be something I ate. Or maybe all the excitement.”
“Do you want a doctor?”
“I just need to lie down a while.”
“When can we talk.” He sensed a widening gulf between them that had not existed a few minutes ago. “Tonight? Between shows?”
“Yes. We can chat then.”
“Promise?”
“Really, Alex, the poor driver will catch pneumonia if he stands there holding the door for me any longer. It’s gotten fifteen degrees colder since lunch.”
Reluctantly he let go of her.
As she got out of the taxi, a blast of frigid air rushed past her and struck Alex in the face.
12
Joanna felt threatened.
She was overcome by the unshakable conviction that her every move was being watched and recorded.
She locked the door of her apartment. She went into the bedroom and latched that door as well.
<
br /> For a minute she stood in the center of the room, listening. Then she poured a double brandy from a crystal decanter, drank it quickly, poured another shot, and put the snifter on the nightstand.
The room was too warm.
Stifling. Tropical.
She was sweating.
Each breath seemed to scorch her lungs.
She opened a window two inches to let in a cold draft, took off her clothes, and stretched out nude atop the silk bedspread.
Nevertheless, she still felt that she was smothering. Her pulse raced. She was dizzy. The room began to move around her as if the bed had become a slowly revolving carousel. She experienced a series of mild hallucinations too, none new to her, images that had been a part of other days and moods like the one that now gripped her. The ceiling appeared to descend between the walls, like the ceiling of an execution chamber in one of those corny old Tarzan movie serials. And the mattress, which she’d chosen for its firmness, suddenly softened to her touch, not in reality but in her mind: It became marshmallowy, gradually closing around her, relentlessly engulfing her, as though it were a living, amoeboid creature.
Imagination. Nothing to fear.
Gritting her teeth, fisting her hands, she strained to suppress all sensations that she knew to be false. But they were beyond her control.
She shut her eyes—but then opened them at once, suffocated and terrified by the brief self-imposed darkness.
She was dismayingly familiar with that peculiar state of mind, those emotions, that unfocused dread. She suffered the same terrors every time that she allowed a friendship to develop into more than a casual relationship, every time that she traveled beyond mere desire and approached the special intimacy of love. The panic attacks had just begun sooner this time, much sooner than usual. She desired Alex Hunter, but she didn’t love him. Not yet. She hadn’t known him long enough to feel more than strong affection. A bond was forming between them, however, and she sensed that their relationship would be special, that it would evolve far faster than usual—which was sufficient to trigger the anguish that had washed like a dark tide over her. And now events, people, inanimate objects, and the very air itself seemed to acquire evil purpose that was focused upon her. She felt a malevolent pressure, squeezing her from all sides, like a vast weight of water, as though she had sunk to the bottom of a deep sea. Already it was unbearable. The pressure would not relent until she turned forever from Alex Hunter and put behind her any danger of emotional intimacy. Intense fear lay dormant in her at all times; now it had been translated into a physical power that squeezed all hope out of her. She knew how it would have to end. She needed to break off the relationship that sparked her claustrophobia; only then would she obtain relief from the crushing, closed-in, listened-to, watched-over feeling that made her heart pound painfully against her ribs.
She would never see Alex Hunter again.
He would come to the Moonglow, of course. Tonight. Maybe other nights. He would sit through both performances.
Until the man left Kyoto, however, Joanna would not mingle with the audience between shows.
He’d telephone. She’d hang up.
If he came around to visit in the afternoon, she would be unavailable.
If he wrote to her, she would throw his letters in the trash without reading them.
Joanna could be cruel. She’d had plenty of experience with other men when simple attraction had threatened to develop into something deeper... and more dangerous.
The decision to freeze Alex out of her life had a markedly beneficial effect on her. Almost imperceptibly at first, but then more rapidly, the immobilizing fear diminished. The bedroom grew steadily cooler, and the sweat began to dry on her naked body. The humid air became less oppressive, breathable. The ceiling rose to its proper height, and the mattress beneath her grew firm once more.
13
The Kyoto Hotel, the largest first-class hotel in the city, was Western style in most regards, and the telephones in Alex’s suite featured beeping-flashing message indicators, which were signaling him when he returned from the eventful afternoon with Joanna Rand. He called the operator for messages, certain that Joanna had phoned during his trip from the Moonglow to the hotel.
But it wasn’t Joanna. The front desk was holding a fax for him. At his request a bellhop brought it to the suite.
Alex exchanged polite greetings and bows with the man, accepted the cable, tipped him, and went through the bowing again. When he was alone, he sat at the drawing-room desk and tore open the flimsy envelope. The message was from Ted Blankenship in Chicago, on Bonner-Hunter letterhead:
Courier arrives at your hotel noon Thursday, your time.
By noon tomorrow Alex would have the complete Chelgrin file, which had been closed for more than ten years but which definitely had now been reopened. In addition to hundreds of field-agent reports and meticulously transcribed interviews, the file contained several excellent photographs of Lisa that had been taken just days before she disappeared. Perhaps those pictures would shock Joanna out of her eerie detachment.
Alex thought of her as she had been when she’d gotten out of the taxi a short while ago, and he wondered why she’d so suddenly turned cold toward him. If she was Lisa Chelgrin, she didn’t seem to know it. Yet she acted like a woman with dangerous secrets and a sordid past to hide.
He suspected that amnesia was the explanation for her situation—perhaps the result of a head injury or even psychological trauma. Of course, amnesia didn’t explain where and why she had come up with an alternate past history.
He looked at his watch: 4:30.
At six-thirty he would take his nightly stroll through the bustling Gion district to the Moonglow Lounge for drinks and dinner—and for that important conversation with Joanna. He had time for a leisurely soak in the tub, and he looked forward to balancing the steamy heat with sips of cold beer.
After fetching an ice-cold bottle of Asahi from the softly humming bar refrigerator, he left the drawing room and went halfway across the bedroom before he stopped dead, aware that something was wrong. He surveyed his surroundings, tense, baffled. The chambermaid had straightened the pile of paperbacks, magazines, and newspapers on the dresser, and she’d remade the bed while he’d been gone. The drapes were open; he preferred to keep them drawn. What else? He couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary—and certainly nothing sinister. But something was wrong. Call it intuition: He’d experienced it before, and usually he’d found it worth heeding.
Alex set the bottle of Asahi on the vanity bench and approached the bathroom with caution. He put his left hand against the heavy swinging door, listened, heard nothing, hesitated, then pushed the door inward and stepped quickly across the threshold.
The late-afternoon sun pierced a frosted window high in one wall, and the bathroom glowed with golden light. He was alone.
This time his sixth sense had misled him. A false alarm. He felt slightly foolish.
He was jumpy. And no wonder. Although lunch with Joanna had been immensely enjoyable, the rest of the day had been a grinding emery wheel that had put a sharp edge on his nerves: her irrational flight from the Korean at Nijo Castle; her description of the oft-repeated nightmare; and his growing belief that the unexplained disappearance of Lisa Jean Chelgrin had been an event with powerful causes and effects, with layers of complex and mysterious meaning that went far deeper than anything that he had uncovered or even imagined at the time it had happened. He had a right to be jumpy.
Alex stripped off his shirt and put it in the laundry bag. He brought a magazine and the bottle of beer from the other room and put them on a low utility table that he had moved next to the bath. He bent down at the tub, turned on the water, adjusted the temperature.
In the bedroom again, he went to the walk-in closet to choose a suit for the evening. The door was ajar. As Alex pulled it open, a man leapt at him from the darkness beyond. Dorobo. A burglar. The guy was Japanese, short, stocky, muscular, very quick. He swung
a fistful of wire shirt hangers. The bristling cluster of hooked ends struck Alex in the face, could have blinded him, and he cried out, but the hangers spared his sight, stung one cheek, and rained around him in a burst of dissonant music.
Counting on the element of surprise, the stranger tried to push past Alex to the bedroom door, but Alex clutched the guy’s jacket and spun him around. Unbalanced, they fell against the side of the bed, then to the floor, with the intruder on top.
Alex took a punch in the ribs, another, and a punch in the face. He wasn’t in a good position to use his own fists, but he heaved hard enough to pitch off his assailant.
The stranger rolled into the vanity bench and knocked it over. Cursing continuously in Japanese, he scrambled to his feet.
Still on the floor, dazed only for an instant, Alex seized the intruder’s ankle. The stocky man toppled to the floor, kicking as he fell. Alex howled as a kick caught his left elbow. Sharp pain crackled the length of his arm and brought a stinging flood of tears to his eyes.
The Japanese was on his feet again, moving through the open doorway, into the drawing room, toward the suite’s entrance foyer.
Blinking away the involuntary tears that blurred his vision, Alex got up, staggered to the doorway. In the drawing room, when he saw that he couldn’t reach the intruder in time to prevent him from getting to the hotel corridor, he plucked a vase from a decorative pedestal and threw it with anger and accuracy. The heavy ceramic exploded against the back of the dorobo’s skull, instantly dropping him to his knees, and Alex slipped past him to block the only exit.
They were breathing like long-distance runners.
Shaking his head, flicking shards of the vase from his broad shoulders, the dorobo got up. He glared at Alex and motioned for him to move away from the door. “Don’t be a hero,” he said in heavily accented English.
“What’re you doing here?” Alex demanded.
“Get out of my way.”