“You'll see.”
He followed her out of the bedroom onto a narrow railed deck that overlooked the first-floor living room of a two-floor suite. A bathroom and another bedroom opened onto the deck, and a carpeted spiral staircase wound down to one corner of the living room. A huge crystal chandelier hung from the roof of the gallery.
Downstairs, she turned to him and said, “They will not be expecting you to enter a room on one floor and immediately come out of a room on the floor below.”
“I believe you've got something,” he said.
“Charm,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Come along.”
At the front door of the suite, she reached for the brass knob, then let go of it, turned, and put her back to the door. She held one finger beside her lips. “Sssshh!”
He put down his suitcases and listened to the voices in the hotel corridor.
“Don't go for your gun,” she said, grinning at him. “It's just the bellhop moving new guests into the room across the hall. Killing them might be exciting, but it would accomplish nothing.” She closed her eyes and listened to the voices beyond the door.
He was standing no more than two feet away from her, and he did not close his eyes. For the first time since he'd seen her upstairs, he had an opportunity to study her face, to look beyond the hair-line scar on her upper lip and the beauty mark on her left cheek. Her forehead was broad and seamless. Her eyebrows were two natural black crescents, and her eyes were deeply set for an oriental face. She had a pert nose, very straight along the bridge, delicate nostrils; and her breathing was as quiet as the flight of a moth. With her high perfect cheekbones, aristocratic haughtiness, and shockingly ripe mouth, she might have been one of those high-priced fashion models who periodically took Manhattan, Paris, and London by storm. Her flawless complexion was the shade of aged book paper, and the sight of it somehow made him feel all warm and loose inside.
And what of the body that went with a face like that? he thought.
He looked down at the rest of her. But she was wearing a long belted trenchcoat that concealed everything except the crudely defined thrust of her breasts and the tininess of her waist. When he looked up again, he found that she was watching him.
Her eyes were large and clear. The irises were as black as her hair. They fixed on his eyes and seemed to bore straight through him, pinning him like an insect to a velvet specimen tray.
He blinked.
She didn't blink.
Suddenly his heart was beating so hard that he could hear it. His mouth was dry. He wanted to sit down somewhere with a drink and knit his nerves together again.
“Now,” she said.
“Now what?”
“Time to go.”
“Oh,” he said quickly.
She turned away from him and opened the door. She leaned out, looked left and right, then went into the hall.
Picking up his suitcases, he followed her. He waited while she locked the suite, and then he trailed her down the corridor and through a brightly marked door into a concrete stairwell.
“We don't want to go out through the lobby,” she said. “They think you're in your room, and they won't be expecting you down there — but one of them might be lurking about just the same. I have a rented car parked near the hotel's side entrance.”
Their footsteps echoed flatly off the concrete walls.
At every landing Canning expected to see a man with a gun. But there was no one on the stairs.
Once he had to call to stop to catch his breath. His shoulders ached from the weight of the bags; he rubbed the back of his neck and wished he were sitting in a hot bath.
“Would you like me to take one of those?” she asked, pointing at the suitcases.
“No, thank you.”
“I'm stronger than I look.”
“That's what McAlister told me.”
She grinned again. She had fine, brilliantly white teeth. “What else did he say about me?”
“Well, he said that the scar on your upper lip came from a fight you were in.”
“Oh? A fight?”
“Some mean bastard carved you with a broken bottle.”
Laughing lightly, she turned and went down the stairs, two at a time. She was almost skipping.
He plodded.
Outside, she helped him put his suitcases in a sparkling white Subaru, then went around and got in behind the wheel. When she drove away from the curb, the tires smoked and squealed, and Canning was pressed back into his seat.
He turned around and looked out the rear window. But it was soon evident that they had not been spotted and followed by any of The Committee's agents.
“Where are we going?” he asked, facing front again.
“Hotel New Otani.”
“Where's that?”
“Not far.”
To Canning's way of thinking, even one block was too far. The frenzied Tokyo traffic was not like anything he had seen before — or like anything he wanted to see again. There did not appear to be any formal lanes along which traffic could flow in an orderly manner; instead, strings of automobiles and trucks and buses crisscrossed one another, weaved and tangled with insane complexity. And the motorbikes, of course, zipped in and out between the larger vehicles, as if their operators had never been told about pain and death.
Initially, Canning felt that Lee Ann Tanaka drove like a certifiable maniac. She swung from one informal “lane” of cars into another without looking to see what was coming up behind her; and other cars' brakes barked sharply in her wake. Repeatedly, she stopped so suddenly and forcefully that Canning felt as if he were being cut in half by his seatbelt. She accelerated when there was absolutely nowhere to go, somehow squeezed in between trucks and buses that appeared to be riding bumper-to-bumper, gave a score of pedestrians intimations of mortality, and used the car's horn as if she thought this was New Year's Eve.
Gradually, however, Canning realized that she knew precisely what she was doing. She smiled continually. She did not appear to be frightened by the dozens of near-collisions — as if she knew from experience the difference between destruction and a millimeter. Evidently she was as at home in the streets of Tokyo as he was in his own living room.
He said, “How long does it take to become a carefree driver in this traffic?”
She shrugged. “I don't know.”
“Well, how long have you been driving here?”
“Since the day before yesterday.”
“Oh, sure.”
She glanced sideways at him. “I'm an American,” she said somewhat sharply. “I was born and raised an American. I'm as American as you are. I was never in Japan in my life — until the day before yesterday.”
“Oh, God,” he said miserably.
“I flew in from San Francisco. Took a written test and an eye exam at the licensing bureau's airport office. Rented this car and been winging it ever since.” As she spoke she swerved out of her lane, cut off a city bus and beat it through the intersection under a changing light.
“I thought you'd driven here all your life.”
She cornered hard, nearly running down several pedestrians who had edged out from the sidewalk. “Thanks for the compliment! It's really not as awful as it looks from the passenger's seat.”
“I'll bet.”
“The only time it gets hairy is around nine in the morning and five in the afternoon. Just like in any American city. And you know what the Japanese call the peak traffic hours?”
“I couldn't guess.”
“Rushawa.”
“Rush hour?”
She spelled it for him, switching lanes twice between the first and the final letters.
He smiled appreciatively. “But since you haven't driven here all your life — do you think you could slow down?”