2 Oct 90—SANTA BARBARA
Ito and Takahashi were puzzled.
The address that Peterson had given them for Mr. Dennis was a frame dwelling on a slightly gone-to-seed street that contained four apartments.
For a time, they sat in the rental Dodge and debated it with each other in low, harsh voices. It was still daylight and they both felt it, that this was the wrong place. But when a man like Peterson has been disemboweled and is trying to save his life by telling the truth, then he tells the truth.
They decided by their sudden lapse into silence.
They entered the apartment on the first floor rented to “Mr. Dennis” but it was absolutely bare.
They decided it was a post office and that the machine would be brought here by the white woman named Rita Macklin.
They had concluded that Rita Macklin had not checked out of her hotel room in Honolulu but had flown to Los Angeles after taking the machine from the unfortunate Captain Peterson, who had died on his knees, cursing them as his own blood filled his mouth.
She had even used her own name on the ticket and purchased it with a credit card. It was hard to believe she was such an amateur.
But why had she not appeared here? And who was Mr. Dennis who directed these labors, first from the sabotage of the Fujitsu and the bribery of the unfortunate Fujitsu captain to the chicanery of Ernest Funo and Captain Peterson and Rita Macklin?
One of them would sit and wait and the other would find a hotel room and take a little sleep. They had been awake for two days across half a world. There were at least six other teams in other places seeing to other details.
The hijacking of the Fujitsu and the loss of the code machine had deeply shamed the organization they belonged to.
Ito and Takahashi did not think of themselves as killers or security agents but as middle management in a large company with good benefits and unlimited possibilities. That their company was a Japanese crime gang and that they had been hired by Masatata Heavy Industries precisely for their skills in the underworld was not material.
“You have to telephone this information to Tokyo,” Takahashi said to Ito before they parted.
“Let us resolve some of it first,” Ito said in his precise way.
He was smaller and more modern than Takahashi, who was quite a giant by Japanese standards and who practiced the ancient rites of the warrior class he was descended from. Or claimed to be descended from.
Ito said, “It would be to our credit and the credit of the organization to have the machine recovered and the guilty punished in a satisfactory way.”
Takahashi deferred. He worked well with Ito because Ito was politically cunning and could judge better the moment when to make this move or that. They had advanced well in harness through the ranks of the crime family.
It was very late in the afternoon and the sun was setting below the Santa Ynez Mountains that stretch all the way to Lompoc in the west.
The setting sun might have made him sleepy standing in the bare room in the bare apartment but Takahashi took the pride of a warrior in his endurance of all manner of deprivation. He had not eaten for a day and said nothing about it to Ito. Even on the flight from Hawaii, he had refused any sustenance except water. It was the purifying way.
At six precisely, a key in the door turned and it opened and Takahashi was ready in the darkness, his knife in hand.
But it wasn’t the white woman at all. The light flicked on overhead and a middle-aged man with the body of a bear and mild saintly eyes stared at him and the knife.
It was Mr. Dennis, Takahashi realized, and took a step.
Whatever Denisov realized was not important. He had pulled out the gun quickly and aimed it right at the large Japanese’s chest.
Takahashi froze.
“Who are you please?”
Mild. But the gun didn’t waver.
“You have stolen our machine.”
Denisov stared at him. “Put down the knife,” Denisov said.
“I must do what I have to do,” Takahashi said and took another step. In a moment, he could spring and kick the pistol out of the small man’s hands and begin to ask him questions.
Denisov never contemplated that.
He fired and the pistol sound was very loud in the bare room. The large man in dark suit and hat and white shirt tried to stare cross-eyed at the bullet hole between his eyes. He was actually dead in that moment but the nerves tingled on and he took another step before he was on his knees and then on the floor, kicking in the final agony of existence, the knife still held in his right hand.