"Tengu" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

Eva bit her lip.
"You're trying to tell me you won't—"
Francesca came to the door. She wasn't carrying any coffee. Gerard held Eva's arms tightly, and warmly, but he said in his softest voice, "No. I won't give up Francesca."
CHAPTER THREE
A few minutes after ten o'clock that morning, the telephone started ringing in a shady, secluded apartment on the fourth floor of a yellow house on Alta Loma Road, off Sunset Boulevard. It rang and rang for almost five minutes before a sliding door opened somewhere in the apartment, and silk-slippered feet came padding along the polished wood floor of the corridor.
Nancy Shiranuka picked up the telephone with long red-lacquered fingernails. She said, "Moshi moshi," in a flat, expressionless voice. Then she said, "Oh, it's you."
She stood silent, listening. She was a small, delicately boned girl, even for a Japanese. Her face had that startling wide-eyed Hokkaido prettiness that Japanese men find devastating, and even Americans consider magnetic, especially if they've served out East. It was an acquired
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taste, Nancy's prettiness, like chazuke, rice and tuna fish with green tea poured over them. She wore nothing but a loose silk robe of glistening black, open at the front. Her long black hair hung tangled and damp over her shoulders.
All around her, the apartment was lined with polished oak paneling, and split-bamboo blinds where drawn over the windows. There were two or three black and-white silk cushions on the floor, and a low table of carved black wood, but apart from these the room was bare. On the walls were three erotic woodblocks by Settei from the Qnna-shimekawa osbie-fumi, the book of sexual instruction for women. The sun shone across the room in narrow stripes.
Nancy asked, "Are you sure this is true? Did Torii tell you? And what happened afterward?"
She paused, listening, and then said, "I see."
While she was listening, the sliding door opened again, and there was the sound of bare feet along the corridor. A very tall American came into the living room, his midriff wrapped in a towel, and he stood quite close to her, watching her with hooded eyes. He was gray-haired, at least sixty-five, and his body was gnarled and muscular and scarred. His face was composed entirely of angles, like Abraham Lincoln's image on the side of Mount Rushmorc, and even before you knew who he was you would have guessed he was a military man.
His name was Ernest Perry Ouvarov, ex-U.S. Naval Commander. He had distinguished himself at Midway and Okinawa, and after the signing of the Japanese surrender on the deck of USS Missouri, he had been largely responsible for the brilliant reorganization of the American naval administration in the Pacific. Truman had once called him "the knight of the high seas."
Beneath the glittering armor, however, the knight had some fatal weaknesses. In 1951, at the peak of his influence within the Navy, a newspaper investigation had implicated him in a bottomless scandal involving opium,
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surplus war materials, and worst of all, the procuring of young Japanese girls, some of them no more than seven years old, for the pleasure of himself and other key naval personnel and politicians.
The corruption had been so deep-laid that Ouvarov had been permitted to resign his command without any formal proceedings against him. As one Pentagon official was heard to remark, "If they court-martial Ouvarov, they'll have to court-martial the whole damned Navy."
Ernest Ouvarov had changed his name, and worked for years in San Francisco for a transshipment company. Most people in San Francisco still called him "Fred Milward," and thought of him as nothing more than the moderately prosperous vice president of Bay Shipping, Inc. Two months ago, though, a young Japanese lady called Nancy Shiranuka had called at his office, and his life had never been the same.
He watched Nancy for a minute or two, and then crossed the bare room to the black table. He opened a lacquered box and took out a cigarette. He came back toward her, tapping the cigarette on his thumbnail.
Nancy said, "Okay, if that's the best you can do. Call me again when you have more news. Yes, I'm sorry, too. Yes. But tell them to keep a real low profile. That's right."
Ernest left the room and went into the kitchen in search of a light. He came back again, smoking with affected indifference. Nancy said, "Call me later," and put down the phone.
"Well," asked Ernest, "what was all that about?"
"I'm not sure yet."
"You're not sure? That was Yoshikazu, wasn't it?"
"Yes," she said. "But he thinks something's gone wrong. The police are everywhere, and he can't get close enough to find out."
"Wrong?" queried Ernest, wrinkling his nose, just the way he used to on the bridge of the USS Ferndale. "What the hell could have gone wrong?"
"I don't know. But Yoshikazu's worried."
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Ernest sucked fiercely at his cigarette, and then blew out smoke. "The whole operation was perfectly planned. I can't believe that anything's gone wrong. Even Yoshkazu isn't that dumb."
Nancy absentmindedly tied the cord of her silk robe. The sun shone on her hair. "Perfect planning doesn't always mean perfect execution. You should know that. Even when you're dealing with ordinary people, things can go wrong.''
"You don't have to give me a lesson in personnel management,'' snapped Ernest. ' This whole thing was set up so tight that nobody had any room to move. Not even the brightest member of the team had room to think. There was no improvisation, no contingency plan, nothing but a sequence of precisely controlled and coordinated events. It can't have gone wrong."
"Yoshikazu seems to think it has."
"Well, in that case, he's probably talking his usual gibberish."
"What are you going to do?" smiled Nancy, slyly. "Clap him in irons? Send him off on the next clipper to Shanghai?"
Ernest scratched the iron-gray stubble on his angular chin. Ht still felt unsettled, working with civilians. His father had been a naval commander before him, and his grandfather had been a friend of Teddy Roosevelt, back in his Rough Rider days. Ernest could only think of life as a battle plan, and he mentally graded the people he had to deal with as admirals, fellow officers, or idiots. Each day presented its difficulties like a fleet of hostile ships, and each difficulty could only be overcome by classic naval tactics. He even walked his three retrievers, John, Paul, and Jones, in line formation.
Only Nancy Shiranuka knew all about those moments when he disembarked (inside his mind) from his self-imposed regime of naval discipline. Those moments when he sought, perversely and desperately, the consolation of girl-children, and extraordinary sexual techniques. He called
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those moments his "shore leave."
"We need some up-to-date intelligence," he said. "Can't Yoshikazu find out what's happening?"
"He's going to try, Commander. But right now the whole area is crawling with police."
Ernest crushed out his cigarette. "Dammit, I should have entrusted this one to somebody with experience.'' He added, with expressive contempt: "Yoshikazu. The nearest Yoshikazu's been to Tokyo is the Japanese take-out on Sunset and Fairfax.''
"I trust him," said Nancy, pointedly. "I believe it's better if we simply wait.''
Ernest looked at her with a testy expression, and then nodded. "All right. We'll give him an hour. If he doesn't report in by then, we'll go take a look for ourselves. Meanwhile, let's keep the television going. They might have a news bulletin."
Nancy gave a sarcastic salute. "Aye, aye, Commander. Anything you say."
The old commander ignored her. "Why don't you have Kimo fix some breakfast? I'm getting damned hungry. Have him fix some of that dashimaki tamago."