Dragonfly

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?”

She whipped the car to the right, stood on the brakes, stopped the car on a hundred-yen coin, and switched off the engine.

Lifting his head from his knees, Canning said, “Jesus! I only asked you to slow down—”

“We're here,” she said brightly.

“What?”

“The Hotel New Otani.”

Dazed, he glanced up just as the uniformed doorman opened the door of the Subaru. The man leaned in, smiled at Canning, offered a hand to help him out of the low-slung little car, and said, “Konnichiwa, sir!”

Afternoon, yes, Canning thought. But was it good? And could it be the same afternoon that he had got off a plane from Honolulu? So much seemed to have happened in the frenetic company of Miss Tanaka. Days seemed to have passed. “Konnichiwa yourself,” he said.

As they followed the doorman and Canning's luggage into the hotel, Lee Ann took his arm and said, “We don't have to register. I've done that already. We're traveling as Mr. and Mrs. J. Okrow. I figure that once The Committee's agents know they've lost you at the Imperial, they'll start checking other hotels — but not for married couples. And if they manage to get their hands on the hotel register — well, the name Okrow sounds Western to the Japanese desk clerk at the Otani, but it probably will sound Japanese to most Westerners.”

“It does to me.”

“You see!”

“You think of everything,” he said, genuine admiration in his voice.

“I try to,” she said, beaming up at him and squeezing his arm in a fine imitation of wifely pleasure and devotion.”

The room she had booked for them was attractive and spacious. Two double beds dressed in white chenille and boasting dark caned headboards were set against one wall. A matching caned nightstand stood between the beds and held a twin-necked lamp, a telephone, and menus from the hotel's restaurants. On the other side of the room, there was a combination desk-dresser with a wall mirror above it. There was also a color television set on its own wheeled cart. Two Danish-style armchairs stood on opposite sides of a small round coffee table. The wallpaper was pebble-textured and cream-colored, except for the wall opposite the windows: that was decorated with an abstract brown and green and white mural of mountains and bamboo fields. In the bathroom — with separate tub and shower stall, sun lamps, and bidet — there was a full bottle of whiskey and another of vodka standing on the makeup counter. A small refrigerator hummed to itself in the niche under the sink, and it was stocked with a variety