13
BY THE TIME I reached the hotel, the pain in my back had become a dull throbbing. My left eye was swollen — he’d gotten a finger in there at one point — and my head ached, probably from when he’d tried to tear loose one of my ears.
I shuffled past the old woman at the front desk, flashing my keys as I went by so she’d know I was already registered. She glanced up and then went back to her reading. I tried to give her only my right profile, which was in better shape than the left. She didn’t seem to notice my face.
I knocked on the door so Midori would know I was coming and then let myself in with the key.
She was sitting on the bed, and jumped when she saw my swollen eye and the scratches on my face. “What happened?” she gasped, and despite the pain the concern in her voice warmed me.
“Someone was waiting for me at my apartment,” I said, locking the door behind me. I let my coat fall off my back and eased myself onto the couch. “It looks like we’re both pretty popular lately.”
She came over and knelt down next to me, her eyes searching my face. “Your eye looks bad. Let me get you some ice from the freezer.”
I watched her walk away from me. She was wearing jeans and a navy sweatshirt that she must have picked up while I was out, and with her hair tied back I had a nice view of the proportions of her shoulders and waist, the curve of her hips. The next thing I knew I was wanting her so much I could almost have forgotten the pain in my back. There was nothing I could do about it. As any soldier who’s really been through it can tell you, extreme horniness is a reaction to combat. One second you’re fighting for your life, and then when it’s over you’ve got a hard-on the size of Manhattan. I don’t know why it happens, but it does.
She came back with some ice in a towel and I shifted on the couch, embarrassed. Electric pain jolted through my back but it didn’t make a dent in my predicament. She knelt down again and held the ice against my eye, smoothing my hair back at the same time. Better if she’d just dumped the cubes in my lap.
She eased me back on the couch and I grimaced, intensely aware of how near she was. “Does that hurt?” she asked, her touch instantly becoming tentative.
“No, it’s okay. The guy who cut up my face hit me in the back with a cane. It’ll be okay.”
Midori held the ice against my eye, her free hand warm on the side of my head, while I sat stiffly, afraid to move and embarrassed at my reaction, and the moment spun slowly out.
At one point she shifted the ice, and I reached to take it from her, but she continued to hold it and my hand wound up covering hers. The back of her hand was warm against my palm, the ice cold on my fingertips. “That feels good,” I told her. She didn’t ask whether I meant the ice or her hand. I wasn’t sure myself.
“You were gone for a long time,” she said after a while. “I didn’t know what to do. I was going to call you, but then I was starting to think, maybe you and those men in my apartment set this up, like good cop, bad cop, to get me to trust you.”
“I would have thought the same. I can imagine how this must all seem to you.”
“It was starting to seem pretty unreal, actually. Until I saw you again.”
I looked at the towel, now speckled red where it had been pressed against my face. “Nothing like a little blood to make things seem real.”
“It’s true. The thing I kept coming back to was how hard you kicked that man at my apartment — I saw blood shoot from his nose. If I hadn’t seen that, I think I would have left while you were gone.”
“Makes me glad I caught him in the head.”
She laughed softly and pressed the towel against my face again. “Tell me what happened.”
“You don’t have anything to eat here, do you?” I asked. “I’m starving.”
She reached for a bag next to the couch and opened it for me. “I brought back some bento. Just in case.”
“Give me a few minutes,” I said, and started wolfing down rice balls, eggs, and vegetables. I washed it all down with a can of mixed fruit juice. It tasted great.
When I was finished, I shifted on the couch so I could see her better. “There were two of them at my apartment,” I said. “I knew one — an LDP flunky I know only as Benny. Turns out he’s connected to the CIA. Would that mean anything to you? Any connection to your father?”
She shook her head. “No. My father never said anything about a Benny or about the CIA.”
“Okay. The other guy was a kendoka — he had a cane that he used like a sword. I don’t know what the connection is. I managed to get both their cell phones. Maybe it’ll give me a clue about who he is.”
I took the ice from her with one hand and leaned across the couch to reach my coat, feeling angry bites of pain in my back as I did so. I pulled the coat over, reached into the inside breast pocket, and pulled out the phones. Both standard DoCoMo issue, small and sleek. “Benny told me the Agency is after the disk. I don’t know why they’re coming after me, though. Maybe they think . . . maybe they think I’m going to tell you something, put something together for you? That I can make use of what you’ve got? Figure out what it is? Prevent them from getting what they want?”
I flipped open the kendoka’s phone and pressed the recall button. A number lit up on the screen. “This is a start. We can do a reverse telephone number search. There might be some numbers preprogrammed, also. I’ve got a friend, someone I trust, who can help us with this.”
I stood up, wincing at the pain in my back. “We’re going to need to change hotels. Can’t behave any differently than the other satisfied patrons.”
She smiled. “I suppose that’s true.”
We changed to a nearby place called the Morocco, which seemed to be organized around some sort of Arabian Nights theme — Oriental rugs, hookahs, belly bracelets, and other harem gear for the woman to wear if she were so inclined. It was the picture of Bedouin luxury, but there was only one bed, and sleeping on the couch was going to be like a night on the rack.
“Why don’t you take the bed tonight?” she said, as though reading my mind. “With your back like that, you can’t very well sleep on this couch.”
“No, that’s okay,” I told her, feeling strangely embarrassed. “The couch is fine.”
“I’ll take the couch,” she said, with a smile that lingered.
I wound up accepting her offer, but my sleep was restless. I dreamed I was moving though dense jungle near Tchepone in southern Laos, hunted by an NVA counter-recon battalion. I had become separated from my team and was disoriented. I would sideslip and double back, but couldn’t shake the NVA. They had me surrounded, and I knew I was going to be captured and tortured. Then Midori was there, trying to get me to take a side arm. “I don’t want to be captured,” she was saying. “Please, help me. Take the gun. Don’t worry about me. Save my Yards.”
I snapped upright, my body coiled like a spring. Easy, John. Just a dream. I tightened my abdomen and forced a long hiss of air out through my nostrils, feeling like Crazy Jake was right there in the room with me.
My face was wet and I thought it was bleeding again, but when I put my hand to my cheek and looked at my fingers I realized that it was tears. What the hell is this? I thought.
The moon was low in the sky, its light flowing in through the window. Midori was sitting up on the couch, her knees drawn to her chest. “Bad dream?” she asked.
I flicked my thumb across the sides of my face. “How long have you been up?”
She shrugged. “Awhile. You were tossing and turning.”
“I say anything?”
“No. Are you afraid of what you might say in your sleep?”
I looked at her, one side of her face illuminated by moonlight, the other hidden in shadow. “Yes,” I said.