The word was ogawa, and I laughed a little, hugging it to me, as the gurney team wheeled me down the hallway.
But the word was slippery. Kept getting away.
I tried to concentrate.
Ogawa-no-jutsu: an esoteric subdivision of ninjutsu. The art of breaking down toxic substances inside the body. You can use it to counteract the most violent poisons. Or to cure indigestion.
I laughed again, riding along, at the idea of using it for indigestion. That had just occurred to me. Master Masuda hadn’t said anything about it, but he would see the connection at once and be amused, as I was, when I told him. Except, of course, that I would probably never see Yoichi Masuda again. New friends now. A new life. Such a lovely day!
The hallway was half paneled with good walnut that had survived terrible abuse over the years and now was being restored by loving hands. Above, a work crew had paused halfway through the job of removing the grimy drabness of institutional green paint in favor of something that would surely have to be better, no matter what it was, and I found myself feeling pleased about that. The old hotel had been a classy lady in her prime; no reason she couldn’t be queen of the beaches again—with the right kind of treatment. Wonderful . . .
Ogawa-no-jutsu.
Hallway lights moved past with swift regularity. We paused under one for a long time, but I didn’t bother my head about why we had stopped. My friends would take care of it. And I had something else to do.
Didn’t I?
Yes. I did. But now it had slipped away from me, and the sense of loss I felt was all out of proportion to the happy world around me. The world of the hotel and my friends and the lights.
Ogawa-no-jutsu.
The busy little entity that was in charge of important things snatched the idea back from the very edge of oblivion and screamed its name at me, jumping up and down to get my attention and tell me it mattered. Terribly. Ogawa-no-jutsu. Master Masuda had only begun my training—but hadn’t I used the technique once without his help? Yes. Sometime or other. I had used it. For what?
No matter. Another time, another place; another day, another dollar. I chuckled to myself as a clanking, wheezing sound announced the arrival of the reason for our pause there in the hallway. A door opened and we moved through it and I found an important new word and concept pushing up through the quicksand of my mind: elevator. We were in an elevator—that was much easier to think about than . . . what was it? The other idea had slipped my mind again and the effort of mounting a new search seemed like more work than I wanted to do just then.
But the little search-creature just wouldn’t quit. Down he went, under the morass and into its center and back again, jiggity-jog.
Ogawa-no-jutsu.
All right already! Give it a rest and give me a rest, you little bastard! Take a break. Smoke if you got ’em, and you don’t have to stay awake on my account. Don’t call me, I’ll never call you.
But it was no good, and by the time the elevator door opened again and we moved into another hallway—higher in the building, I thought; the elevator has seemed to be going up—my little friend had cleared away a little circle in an unnoticed corner of the mind and set up shop there. And suddenly I wasn’t happy anymore. Suddenly I was afraid.
It was a new kind of fear, different from the terror of distorted reality that had kept me quivering when the wall of my room wouldn’t stay closed. I was afraid for Angela Palermo, for what had happened to her in the past and might happen to her again—might be happening to her right now, for all I knew.
That wasn’t much. But it was enough; enough different from the happy, laid-back disinterest I had felt before so that I knew it represented progress—and the little workadaddy in the boondocks danced around shouting hosannas.
Just in time.
The gurney journey ended abruptly with a quick turn through the door of a bare little room where a single low-power bulb burned in the ceiling, and I was lifted from the wheeled cart to another bed. It was harder than the one I’d had before, and while I was pondering that, the pair who had been my tour guides strapped both my wrists into restraints affixed to the metal headboard and then secured my feet to the other end. There was even a nifty little headband to make sure I didn’t bump my rock during whatever was in store for me. I lay passive, letting it all happen, and stayed that way after they finally left the room.
The ceiling light served well enough as a focus point.
Ogawa-no-jutsu . . .
It was harder than I remembered; I would have it almost right, then lose the thread and slip back into the slough of easy acceptance that seemed so warm and welcoming.
Also, there were interruptions. I had been in the room a month or two when something short and solid and female bustled in and pulled back the sleeve of the hospital gown I seemed to be wearing and injected me in the upper arm, rubbing the spot with alcohol before and after with a kind of professional flourish that went with the ease and relative painlessness of the needlework. I wanted to ask her if she was an R.N. or just had gotten a lot of practice here at Gideon’s Halloween Club, but by the time I was able to frame the question she was gone—and I almost lost myself over the edge of the conscious world before I could get the parts of my mind that I still controlled to work on neutralizing whatever she had pushed into my system.
Not knowing the exact nature of the substances made it harder; Master Masuda hadn’t brought me far enough in the art to handle this. I was a novice. Not really ready.
But I could take it a little way, far enough to focus on the need to keep trying—far enough to begin to make progress. And always there was the goad, the little closet bogey of anxiety that kept popping out and telling me to get on with it. Time was passing. Hurry!
I strained at the wristbands to make them hurt, and the pain helped.
It helped me concentrate again.
I never found out how long I was in that room, or how long it took to achieve even a small measure of control over the inner processes of my body. But by the time I had company again, progress had been made. I still wasn’t fully in command. If I had been, the straps wouldn’t have continued to immobilize my wrists and ankles. And head.
Not to worry. The crest was behind and the anxious little fellow with the ferret instincts was laboring steadily, effectively, instead of describing panic-circles when the door opened again and a tall, thin man entered.
He smiled at me—as with dear old Jackhandle Jack Soames, the emotion never seemed to rise as high as the bright-china eyes—and said his name was Immanuel Flax. Just call him Manny.
I didn’t smile back, and that seemed to worry him.
“What’s the matter?” he inquired. “Not treating you right around here? I expected to see you laughing and scratching, bro! Here . . . we can fix all that.”
Fix.
The doctor was a true wordsmith; exact nomenclature a specialty.
He had brought a wheeled tray of equipment with him, and he whistled a little tune, rubbing his hands briskly as he made his selections from its array of plenty. Low-dose syringe—I was grateful for that; the spike is thin and Teflon-coated—and careful attention to injecting just the right amount of air through the rubber stopper before drawing out the colorless joy juice. Not much. Five units intramuscularly, push.
No sting from the needle, the craftsman worthy of his . . . what? I couldn’t remember. He disassembled the kit with professional swiftness, removing the spike and bending the barrel to make sure it wouldn’t be reused for some perverted dope fiend, while keeping an eye cocked on my reactions. I did my best to give him a few, but had to wait for his cue to see what they ought to be. The good doctor would never understand, or believe, but whatever he had hit me with had entered my system in one form but reached the central cortex as salt water. Not pure saline, perhaps; I just didn’t know enough. But I thought Master Masuda might have been pleased. I certainly was.
“You’re quite comfortable now, aren’t you?” Flax said. “Quite comfortable and relaxed? The injection I had given you is intended to help you feel that way. No need to fight it, and no need to fear. We all have your best interests at heart and you can relax. Let the lungs do their own thing. No pain, no strain. Eyelids want to close over the eyes . . . excuse me . . . over the eye? Just let it happen. You are falling into a deep sleep. Deeper . . . and deeper.”
It almost happened, at that.
The mental exertions of ogawa-no-jutsu, particularly for one not truly adept, are considerable, and I chose just the wrong moment to rest. The lung work had, indeed, become deep and regular and the eyelid was closing by the time I caught myself. And even then, I still had to pretend to go along with the gag.
But the sleep-talk had told me what kind of garbage he had pushed into my system, and so I was able to give him the reactions he would expect.
Very anxious to please. Very responsive to every comment, every comforting gesture. We were good friends. I let him see me folding back into myself, into the web of soft darkness, looking inward to a sea of blackness that was the core of the world and hearing his voice just the tiniest bit apart from me.
“Now, then,” he said when he was sure that all resistance was history, “let’s have a little talk, you and I. You’d like to do that, wouldn’t you?”
I said I would.
And at first it was just that, a casual conversation between old and dear friends. A little of my family history. He seemed interested in me. Especially my marriage, and how it had ended during my first tour of duty in ‘Nam. Details: the visit to the grave after I got home and the resignation from the priesthood and from the Chaplain Corps. Reenlistment and the second—shorter—tour in country. As a grunt. And the second battle of Khe Sanh.
It was easier than it might have been, and he didn’t seem to want to go too far below the surface, where the going might have been harder. I’d made what peace I could with the rest of it a long time ago and could talk about it with a fair approximation of sleep-trance. But I got the feeling he knew most of the answers anyway and was just checking out my reactions.
And when he was sure, the conversation took a new turn.
“The Master,” he said in a reverent tone that told me far more than I wanted to know about his personal relationship with Gideon, “is most interested in you.”
I considered telling him I was glad to hear it. But didn’t.
“Jack Soames was one kind of problem. A hard man, street-tough and street-wise. He came seeking to do the Master an injury. Because of his wife. Because of the effect the Master has on some women . . . ”
That time the words were on target. Doped or straight, I knew about the “effect the Master has on some women” and a lot about how it was achieved and found myself having real trouble keeping the memory out of the face I showed to his psycho-medical henchman.
“ . . . and it was necessary to deal with him. Direct physical violence was, I may say, not entirely out of the question. Mr. Soames was, in fact, himself determined upon violence and such a reaction would have been both normal and even legally defensible had it become necessary. But the Master is subtle, and he saw the value of such a person—saw what a sure and steady asset he might become, did become, given a certain amount of reorientation—and was able to obtain total cooperation. With my help.”
The walls around me had stopped growing doors, but one opened in the back of my mind and a little salamander of terror slipped out of it and screamed “just one mistake, one little slip . . . ” before I could shove it back out of sight and get the door locked again. This smiling brain-bandit really couldn’t see anything wrong with what he had done. And now wanted to do to me.
“You,” he continued calmly, “show similar potential. The Master is aware of it, and I must say I concur. We will do great things in the days to come; you shall enter the choir of inspired souls chanting the glory of the Master—and furthering the work of his kingdom here on earth—of your own volition and with a sense of exaltation you cannot now imagine. Oh, we will do great things together, you and I!”
He smiled fondly at me. And then shifted gears.
“But for the moment,” he said, “we have more mundane tasks. You have a piece of information—nothing too important but the kind of loose end the Master does not like to leave behind—that we are anxious to obtain. You want to help us do that, don’t you?”
I said I would like that, and he nodded his approval.
“Excellent! Now, then—where did Sergeant Palermo hide the remainder of his diamonds?”
We expanded on that theme, trying it backward and forward and from all sides, for the next few hours while I did my best to gauge time.
The injection he had given me was obviously a hypnotic of some kind, and such things have a trajectory in the system that is both limited and predictable. At various stages I would be expected to show signs first of resistance to hypnosis, then of willing acceptance, in which state I would be most amenable to Flax’s questioning, and finally of near-stuporous surrender to the drug, from which state I would have to be revived if questioning was to be continued.
Flax took me through the whole cycle several times while I simulated whatever whips and jingles I thought he was expecting.
It should have been worth an Oscar.
Or an Emmy at the very least—best performance by a male victim in a lunatic’s wish-fulfillment fantasy.
But in the end, Flax didn’t seem entirely pleased.
“I am very much afraid,” he said, gathering up the last of the spike-and-phial kits and dumping it into the disposal bag with the rest of the trash from our session, “that the Master is not going to be willing or able to accept this result. He will assume some flaw in my interrogation technique, and I will be criticized.”
He shook his head sadly.
“For whatever comfort it may afford,” he continued, “I am satisfied that you have told me the truth. That the missing cache of stones either does not exist or that its location is in fact unknown to you. But the Master is convinced that it exists. That you can lead him to it. And you may be sure he will act on that conviction. My methods have failed to produce the desired result. Alternate means will therefore be found.”
It was a late-movie exit line, turgid and leaden with overplayed menace. Heavy-handed.
And utterly believable.
He left me alone to ponder its wonderful sincerity, locking the door behind him.